Campaign News

Ed Week - March 3, 2015, by Arianna Prothero - A national poll of U.S. voters finds that although a majority of voters support charter schools, they aren't necessarily in favor of expanding them.

The survey, conducted for In the Public Interest and the Center for Popular Democracy—two groups involved in education policy and skeptical of charters—found participants largely favor charter school reform proposals such as requiring open board meetings, regular audits, and policies to help shield district schools from the impact of charter schools opening up nearby.

The two organizations are partnering to push a series of charter school accountability proposals. The initiative, called the Charter School Accountability Agenda, was unveiled in tandem with the poll results and quickly received support from the American Federation of Teachers, one of the two national teachers' unions. The proposals are based off of a September report released from Brown University's Annenberg Institute for School Reform. 

However, the survey also found that lack of school choice falls last on a list of education concerns, including issues such as class-size and parental involvement.

Sixty-two percent of those surveyed said they either wanted the number of charter schools in their area maintained or reduced.

Forty-four percent said they favored charter schools when asked without a description of what charters are, but that number climbed to 52 percent when participants were provided a description. Eighteen percent said they opposed charter schools when not given a definition, and 38 percent said they opposed charter schools after seeing a description.

When asked if charter schools are public or private schools, 30 percent said the former and 58 percent checked the latter.

Those results are somewhat reminiscent of another poll conducted recently by Gallup, which found strong support for charter schools even though many people didn't really understand how charters work.

The public polling firm GBA Strategies surveyed 1,000 people, selected randomly from a national voter file, on behalf of the Center for Popular Democracy and In the Public Interest. You can dig into more of the survey results here.

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El ex informático del banco suizo HSBC, Hervé Falciani, que destapó los nombres de presuntos evasores fiscales en bancos helvéticos, ha celebrado que siete directivos del Banco Santander estén citados a declarar en la Audiencia Nacional por un delito de blanqueo de capitales, ya que, según ha dicho, "cada día hay ejemplos similares en otros países".

Lea el artículo completo aquí.

As the movement for a $15 minimum wage grows, low-wage workers know the problem isn’t just the hourly pay rate. It’s also the number of hours scheduled. I’ve worked at Gap in multiple locations since October 2014. I’d like to earn a living wage – but a raise alone won’t help me pay the bills if exploitative schedules aren’t fixed too.

I spent most of 2014 unemployed while applying to dozens of jobs. Then, in October, I finally got a job at Gap. Our schedule comes out less than a week in advance. Some of the shifts leave workers “on-call,” meaning we don’t know if we’re going to be working at all that day. The earliest we find out is two hours before the shift is scheduled to start. At my first store, I had 18 hours of penciled-in shifts with only nine guaranteed hours some weeks. This is not uncommon in the industry.

The volatility of on-call scheduling, in combination with the low pay, meant my life at Gap wasn’t all that different from when I was unemployed. Though I was working, I still had to go to a food pantry for groceries. In winter, I had to choose between racking up heat bills I couldn’t afford and freezing in my apartment. My landlord would ask me when I’d have the rent money, but I couldn’t give her an answer because I never knew how many hours I’d actually work in a given week. I couldn’t afford to live in the city where I worked, so I had to transfer to a Gap store back home.

I’m not the only one struggling. Retail workers have the second-lowest average weekly earnings of workers in any sector in the US economy: $444 per week. We also have the second-lowest average weekly working hours. From 2006 to 2010, the number of people working part-time for economic reasons and not by choice, grew from 4 to 9 million. It’s called involuntary part-time work, meaning we want full-time employment but a lack of opportunities prevents us from doing so. 

Unpredictable last-minute scheduling makes it difficult to budget and turns even the most basic decisions into headaches. Will we need babysitters for our children? Will we be able to make a doctor’s appointment? Will we have to rush to Gap from our second jobs? 

One of my co-workers, started working at Gap as she was transitioning out of homelessness, but she wasn’t making enough to get stable housing on her own. Most so-called middle class jobs lost in the recession have been replaced by low-wage work like retail jobs. I’m thankful to be working, but gratitude born of desperation is no comfort and it certainly doesn’t pay the rent.

As the involuntary part-time worker population has drastically grown, so too has Gap’s executive compensation. Since 2010, total executive compensation packages exploded from $19m to over $42m by 2014. Former CEO Glenn Murphy’s compensation increased from $5.9m in 2010 to $16m in 2014. So-called ‘on-call scheduling’ creates a cheap on-demand workforce, enabling the Gap to pad its bottom line. The gains don’t go to us; they flow to the top-earners in the company. We make the sacrifices, they reap the rewards. 

Another co-worker began working at Gap, in addition to a second retail job, as a way to escape the illicit drug trade. My colleague once told me: “everybody wants a job, no one wants to really be out hustling in the streets.” But the on-call shifts became unbearable, and he struggled to pay rent. For him, the trade-off between street money and regular employment was costly. This structural combination of low wages and unfair scheduling pressures workers into the underground economy, and is a hidden pipeline to the prison system.

I do, however, feel hope. Here in Minnesota, lawmakers are considering new legislation, supported by workers and community groups like Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, that would require three weeks’ advance notice of work schedules. Across the country, low-wage workers are fighting for fair scheduling and the tide is turning. Just this summer, Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch have announced an end to their on-call shifts. The Gap can be part of this rising tide.

Source: The Guardian

The Federal Reserve faces criticism from lawmakers and others over its record on diversity at the same time the central bank is highlighting the economic outlook for minority groups.

Several Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee questioned Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen on Tuesday about the selection process for regional Fed bank presidents, echoing the concerns of advocacy groups who have said the system should be more open and allow more public input.

The 12 regional bank presidents are appointed by regional boards, subject to approval by the Washington, D.C.-based Fed board of governors. As heads of regional Fed branches, they are expected to keep their fingers on the pulse of their local economies and participate on decisions about interest rates. Just two of the current presidents are women and none are black or Hispanic. The last black president stepped down in 1974.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) criticized the selection process, saying Washington officials represented little more than a rubber stamp. Earlier this year, Fed governors signed off on the reappointment of most bank presidents until 2021 “without any public debate or any public discussion,” she said.

“If you’re concerned about this, why didn’t you use either of these opportunities to say enough is enough. Let’s go back and see if we can find qualified regional presidents who also contribute to the overall diversity of the Fed’s leadership?” Ms. Warren asked.

“It just shows me that the selection process for regional Fed presidents is broken,” retorted Ms. Warren, calling on Congress to consider changing the process.

The Center for Popular Democracy, a left-leaning advocacy group, has been pressing the Fed for months to increase the diversity of its leadership, as have many Democrats on Capitol Hill who signed onto a letter from Ms. Warren to Ms. Yellen on the matter last month.

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has also weighed in. Her campaign released a statement saying the Fed “needs to be more representative of America as a whole.”

In a June 13 response to the lawmakers’ letter, Ms. Yellen acknowledged “there is still work to be done” on diversity within the Fed ranks “and I assure you that workforce diversity remains a priority for the Federal Reserve.”

In her prepared testimony Tuesday, Ms. Yellen stressed the need to ensure that the gains from the economic recovery are widely distributed.

She noted that blacks and Hispanics are still suffering some of the effects of the recession in more pronounced ways than other groups. Black and Hispanic workers still face higher unemployment rates than the workforce as a whole, she said.

“It is troubling that unemployment rates for these minority groups remain higher than for the nation overall, and that the annual income of the median African-American household is still well below the median income of other U.S. households,” Ms. Yellen said.

Diverging economic circumstances between white and black households predate the recession but the gaps widened after the financial crisis and have only barely narrowed in the recovery.

A Fed report released alongside Ms. Yellen’s testimony found that black households, which saw their median incomes fall 16% during the recession, are only 88% of the way back to prerecession levels. White households, by contrast, saw incomes fall only 8% and are already back to 94% of prerecession levels, the report said.

It is rare for the Fed to address the economic conditions for individual demographic groups. The central bank’s congressional mandate requires that it seek to hold down unemployment and keep inflation stable for the country as a whole. In the past, Ms. Yellen has said she was sympathetic to the economic troubles of minority groups but stressed the Fed’s options for addressing them were limited.

Ms. Yellen’s comments Tuesday suggest a rising recognition within the Fed that the racial gaps in the economy are becoming more pronounced and that there is a role for monetary policy to play in shrinking those gaps.

“It’s important for us to be aware of those differences and to focus on them as we think about monetary policy and work that the Federal Reserve does in the area of community development,” she said.

Ms. Yellen is set to address the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday and could face many of the same questions.

By  David Harrison

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