Laws & Lives
New York Daily News - January 23, 2015, by Josie Duffy - We all want to see New York thrive, but weakening critical workplace safety laws like the Scaffold Safety Law would only...
New York Daily News - January 23, 2015, by Josie Duffy - We all want to see New York thrive, but weakening critical workplace safety laws like the Scaffold Safety Law would only put the most vulnerable workers at risk (“Cure what ails New York, gov,” Column, Jan. 21). As Fox News recently reported, deaths among Latino and immigrant construction workers are on the rise, even as they fall for other workers. The Scaffold Safety Law creates a strong incentive to keep workers safe. It says that if those who control a worksite fail to follow commonsense rules, they can be held liable for the injuries they cause. Without a strong Scaffold Safety Law, we’ll only see many more injured construction workers across New York — with Latino and immigrant workers most at risk. Josie Duffy, policy advocate Center for Popular Democracy
Automatic Voter Registration Will Make America a Real Democracy
Last weekend, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a historic bill making California the second state in the country to automatically register voters. The new legislation will give 6.6 million...
Last weekend, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a historic bill making California the second state in the country to automatically register voters. The new legislation will give 6.6 million eligible but unregistered voters an opportunity to exercise their citizenship right.
The bill, which registers voters who show up at the Department of Motor Vehicles to obtain a driver’s license or an identification card, follows record low turnout in last year’s midterm elections, for which only 42 percent of those eligible to vote in California went to the polls. California’s low turnout is a snapshot of what’s happening across the country.
Beset with long lines on Election Day, strict voter ID laws and teetering piles of paper records full of errors, the country’s voter registration system is fundamentally broken—leaving nearly a third of all eligible Americans unregistered to vote. By comparison, 93 percent of eligible voters are on the rolls in our neighboring country of Canada.
In the United States, we take pride in our democracy and freedom, and voting should serve as the cornerstone of that proud democracy. Automatic voter registration is critical to that democratic process.
Imagine if all 50 states implemented automatic voter registration. The Center for Popular Democracy did, crunched the numbers and found that a voter registration system collecting data from not just the DMV but also revenue agencies, the Postal Service and others could result in the registration of 56 million more voters. This is assuming that automatic voter registration systems would capture approximately 90 percent of the total electorate.
Right now, our state of democracy is far from what it should be. In the 2012 presidential election, a mere 133 million out of 215 million Americans eligible to vote exercised their right to do so. The U.S. ranks 120 out of 162 countries in electoral participation.
Our current outmoded paper-based voter registration system makes the process of registering to vote unnecessarily cumbersome, disproportionately disenfranchising low-income communities, blacks, Latinos and young people.
Roughly 62 million eligible voters are currently unregistered, either because they never registered or their registration information is incorrect. In a 2008 Current Population Survey, blacks and Latinos cited “difficulties with the registration process” as their reason for not registering to vote, while whites disproportionately reported not registering because they were “not interested in elections or politics.”
Automatic voter registration could change this scenario, and the tide is right now turning toward building a stronger democracy. Political leaders and grassroots movements across the nation are succeeding in pushing universal voter registration forward.
A strong democracy with easy access to voter registration would give power to communities frequently marginalized by the system. Universal automatic voter registration would provide power to push for causes such as affordable high-quality child care, better wages, job security and quality public education.
A truly democratic America doesn’t make its citizens jump through hoops to gain access to a basic entitlement: the right to vote. It’s time for automatic voter registration.
Source: Newsweek
The Fed needs a revolution: Why America’s central bank is failing — and how we can make it work for us
The Fed needs a revolution: Why America’s central bank is failing — and how we can make it work for us
One reality hanging over the presidential election and our politics in general is this: No matter what terrific plan a politician has for creating jobs and boosting wages, it must contend with the...
One reality hanging over the presidential election and our politics in general is this: No matter what terrific plan a politician has for creating jobs and boosting wages, it must contend with the Federal Reserve’s ability to unilaterally counteract it. If the Fed decides higher wages risk inflation, they can raise interest rates and deliberately strangle economic growth, reversing the wage effect. Why come up with ways to grow the economy, then, if the Fed will react by intentionally slowing it?
The reason the Fed operates as a wet blanket on the economy has to do with who really controls the institution. If the desires of bankers and the rich outweigh the desires of laborers, then their fear of inflation (which cuts into their profits) will always take precedence over full employment. Former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke unwittingly gave a perfect example of that yesterday. Talking about how the Fed could institute “helicopter drops” of money to supplement federal spending and jump-start the economy, he stated from the outset, “no responsible government would ever literally drop money from the sky.” Who sets the boundaries of what’s “responsible” matters a great deal here.
To make the central bank work in the public interest rather than the interests of a select few, you must reform the very structure of the Federal Reserve. That’s the purpose of a new proposal from Andrew Levin, an economics professor at Dartmouth College and former advisor to Fed Chairs Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen. In conjunction with the activist group Fed Up, which advocates for pro-worker policies at the Fed, Levin has devised a framework to make the central bank a fully public institution, with all the transparency and accountability demanded of other government entities.
It’s such an important idea that Warren Gunnels, policy director for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, talked it up yesterday on a conference call with Levin. While stopping short of endorsing taking the Fed public, Gunnels did say, “Senator Sanders believes we need to made the Fed a more democratic institution, responsive to the concerns of all Americans, not a few billionaires on Wall Street.”
Right now, the Fed is a quasi-public, quasi-private hybrid, taking advantage of that status to maintain high levels of secrecy. Members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, like other federal agencies. But the twelve regional Federal Reserve banks are legally owned by commercial banks in each of those regions. Banks like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo hold stock in these regional banks, which happen to be one of their primary regulators.
This was how central banks worldwide operated at the time of the Fed’s founding, but that has changed. “Every other central bank around the world is fully public,” Professor Levin said, citing the Bank of Canada’s shift in the 1930s and the Bank of England in the 1940s.
Not only does having private banks own a chunk of the Fed raise questions about regulatory supervision, it implicitly privileges banker concerns over the public at large. This is particularly important because the Fed has failed as an institution consistently over the past decade.
First it failed to identify an $8 trillion housing bubble, along with increases in leverage and derivatives exposure that magnified the housing collapse into a larger crisis. Then, it failed to deploy all its policy tools and allowed a slow recovery to take hold that left millions of workers behind, as growth never caught up to its expectations. British economist Simon Wren-Lewis believes the third big mistake is happening now, through premature interest rate hikes to return to “normal” operations. “Central banks are wasting a huge amount of potential resources” by tightening too quickly, Wren-Lewis says. For everyday Americans, that translates into millions more people out of work than necessary.
So Levin’s plan would cash out the banks’ stock, and begin to remove their influence over the Fed. The board of directors of the regional Fed banks, which currently includes commercial bank executives, would be chosen through a representative process with mandates for diversity (no African-American has ever served as a regional Fed president) and a variety of viewpoints. Nobody affiliated with a financial institution overseen by the Fed could serve on any regional board.
These newly elected boards of directors would choose the regional presidents, which have a say on monetary policy decisions. That selection process would include public hearings and feedback. Under the current system, Fed presidents are re-elected through a pro forma process, with no opportunity for public engagement. Four of the 12 regional presidents were formerly executives at Goldman Sachs, and it’s hard to call that a coincidence.
In addition to breaking the conflict of interest inherent in current Fed governance, making the institution public would subject it to disclosure requirements, Freedom of Information Act requests, and external reviews that all other public agencies must submit to. Levin’s proposal calls for an annual Government Accountability Office review of Fed policies and procedures, and would allow the Fed’s inspector general new authority to investigate the regional banks.
The Levin proposal too often makes concessions to preserving central bank “independence,” like preserving the regional structure and giving Fed officials nonrenewable seven-year terms, which seems a little arbitrary. This impulse also led Democrats to reject Sen. Rand Paul’s legislation to audit the Fed earlier this year. The rhetoric of Federal Reserve “independence” conceals an institutional capture that allows it to ignore workers’ needs in favor of the wealthy. And its persistent failures and banker influence weaken the case for that independence.
Nevertheless, the heart of the proposal is to return democracy to the Fed, so the institution will edge away from its commitment to capital over labor. “The fundamental piece is that the Fed must be a public institution,” said Ady Barkan of the Fed Up Coalition.
Liberals too often ignore the Fed and the role it plays in the economy, but that’s starting to change. An obscure piece of the Federal Reserve Act statute identified by then-House staffer Matt Stoller led to a remarkable cut of billions of dollars in subsidies to big banks last year, under a Republican-majority Congress. Now the Fed Up coalition is not only rolling out this reform plan, but pushing the presidential candidates to answer whether the Fed should deliberately slow down the economy, make sure their institution looks like the general public, and reduce the power of private banks on its operations. (Bernie Sanders laid out his views on Fed reform in the New York Times last December, some of which intersect with the Fed Up proposal. Warren Gunnels, Sanders’ Policy Director, would only say that the Fed Up plan “deserves serious consideration.”)
A public, inclusive debate over Fed transparency and accountability is critical, given the importance of this institution to the economy. “These reforms would put the Fed on a path to serving the public for the next 100 years,” said Professor Levin. And that has to mean all the public, through democratic principles, not just the executives at our biggest banks.
By David Dayen
Source
Fed Up Says It Unjustly Lost Rooms at Jackson Hole Meeting
Fed Up Says It Unjustly Lost Rooms at Jackson Hole Meeting
A coalition of community and labor groups known as “Fed Up” said 39 members planning to stay at the hotel hosting the Federal Reserve’s prestigious annual retreat in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, were...
A coalition of community and labor groups known as “Fed Up” said 39 members planning to stay at the hotel hosting the Federal Reserve’s prestigious annual retreat in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, were unfairly singled out when their 13 room reservations were canceled.
The group, which is pressing the U.S. central bank to appoint more minorities and women to its leadership, said most of its attendees would have been black and Latino. It has filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice and other government officials. The group believes it lost the rooms because of “specific targeting of the Fed Up coalition.”
Fed Chair Janet Yellen is the first woman to lead the U.S. central bank and it remains under pressure to become more diverse. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton joined calls for reform in May and the central bank has taken fire from Republicans, who warn its low interest rate policies risk inflating another asset bubble.
The Fed Up coalition, which wants rates to stay low to boost hiring and lift wages, has discussed its concerns with Fed officials, including Esther George, president of the Kansas City Fed, which hosts the annual Jackson Hole monetary-policy conference in late August.
Faced with criticism that it doesn’t look out for the interests of poorer Americans, the Fed has been making efforts to change. The Kansas City Fed said on Thursday that it will hold a conference on the challenges low- to moderate-income communities face on Sept. 7-8 at its headquarters.
Booking Error
Alex Klein, vice president and general manager of Grand Teton Lodge Company and Flagg Ranch, said the reservations were canceled because “an error in the booking system” resulted in the Jackson Lake Lodge being oversold by 18 rooms. “We worked proactively and diligently with guests to relocate them to our nearby Flagg Ranch property,” he said in a statement.
The Kansas City Fed has a contract to provide rooms for guests at the symposium and “has no input regarding any decisions that the Lodge makes outside of its contract with us,” said bank spokesman Bill Medley.
The symposium, which gathers policy makers and economic-thought leaders for a three-day retreat in the heart of the Grand Teton mountains, is probably the most important event of its kind on the central-banking calendar. Yellen will attend and plans to address the conference on Aug. 26. This year’s meeting, which is invitation only, is focused on the topic “Designing Resilient Monetary Policy Frameworks for the Future.”
The hotel, while remote, is open to the public and Fed Up representatives have made the trip for the past two years. In 2015, Fed Up held an alternative conference at the Lodge which was addressed by Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.
By Steve Matthews & Jeanna Smialek
Source
Statement on Abercrombie & Fitch’s Ending of Just-in-time Scheduling
Following reports that Abercrombie and Fitch stores will no longer schedule employees for “on-call” shifts, an unnecessary scheduling practice that forces working people to put their lives on hold...
Following reports that Abercrombie and Fitch stores will no longer schedule employees for “on-call” shifts, an unnecessary scheduling practice that forces working people to put their lives on hold for hours every week without guarantee of work or compensation for their time, Elianne Farhat, Deputy Campaign Director for the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy, released the following statement:
“Working families across the country understand that our time counts. Every hour put on-hold is an hour they cannot plan on using to spend quality time with loved ones, study for college classes or work a second job. On-call schedules unnecessarily disrupt working people’s lives and prevent us from being able to work hard and meet our off-the-clock responsibilities. We hope this announcement comes as part of a larger shift towards better scheduling practices at Abercrombie and Fitch, and we congratulate workers with groups like RWDSU and Retail Action Project for organizing and demanding an end to this unfair scheduling practice.
“Still, the fight goes on. Working people, just like those at Abercrombie & Fitch, are standing up across the country to demand fair schedules. Employers who use this unnecessary practice, like Bath & Body Works, Gap, Urban Outfitters and L Brands should follow suit and end on-call scheduling.”
Working parents and students as well as experts on scheduling and childcare issues are available for interviews.
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The Fair Workweek Initiative (FWI), a collaborative effort anchored by the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), is bringing together leading worker, community and policy organizations across the country to raise industry standards and develop, drive and win policy solutions that achieve a workweek working families can count on.
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.
A Broken Promise: Agency-Based Voter Registration in New York City
Executive Summary
Voter registration is the number one barrier to the vote. An estimated 51 million eligible citizens, more than 24 percent of the electorate, could not cast a ballot on...
Voter registration is the number one barrier to the vote. An estimated 51 million eligible citizens, more than 24 percent of the electorate, could not cast a ballot on Election Day in the 2012 presidential election solely because they had not been registered. Registration and voting rates are particularly low for families with annual incomes below $20,000, voters of color, naturalized citizens, and those with limited English proficiency. Civic engagement levels are even worse in New York State. Fewer New Yorkers registered to vote and cast a ballot in the November 2012 general election than the national average.
Download the report here.
One proven method of increasing voter participation, particularly among underrepresented citizens, is voter registration at public agencies (“agency-based registration”). Well-administered voter registration programs established at public assistance agencies pursuant to federal law have helped register 15 to 20 percent of agency applicants. In 2000, New York City sought to expand voter registration opportunities at municipal agencies by enacting Local Law 29 (“the Pro-Voter Law”), which required 18 city agencies and, under certain circumstances, their associated subcontractors, to offer voter registration forms to all persons submitting applications, renewals, or recertification for agency services, or notifying the agency of a change of address. The law included each of the City’s 59 community boards as well. The last and only evaluation of the Pro-Voter Law, undertaken by the New York City Council over a decade ago, found that agencies were failing to offer voter registration.
In 2014, the Center for Popular Democracy, Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, Citizens Union of the City of New York, and the New York Public Interest Research Group formed the Pro-Voter Law Coalition and launched a new initiative to assess the agencies’ compliance with the law and opportunities to enhance the law’s impact. The Pro-Voter Law Coalition submitted Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests to each of the 18 city agencies; met with the Voter Assistance Advisory Committee at the New York City Campaign Finance Board; and, along with the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund and Make the Road New York, launched field investigations at 14 city offices subject to the Pro-Voter Law to measure their compliance with the law.
The FOIL responses and field investigations revealed widespread agency failure to implement the Pro-Voter Law. Specifically, they found:
Inconsistent adherence. Documents provided by the 12 agencies that responded to FOIL requests indicated scattered and inconsistent attention to the Pro-Voter Law; Noncompliance in a majority of interactions. In 84 percent of client interactions, agency officials failed to comply with the Pro-Voter Law’s requirement to offer voter registration application forms; Failure to provide language access. Agency failures extended to bilingual voter registration mandates. Specifically, only 40 percent, or 2 out of 5 agency clients whose primary language was not English were given translated voter registration applications; and No training of agency staff. All 11 of the agency employees who responded to training inquiries admitted that no agency staff receive regular training on voter registration procedures.These findings are particularly significant given that over 30 percent, or 18 of 59 citizen clients interviewed at the agencies required to comply with the Pro-Voter Law’s mandates reported they were not registered to vote.
Agency failure to comply with the Pro-Voter Law marks a lost opportunity to increase New York City voter registration rates and, by extension, voter participation in the city. Expanding opportunities for New Yorkers to register to vote at municipal agencies will require a concerted commitment by the Mayor, City Council, and municipal agency heads. The Pro-Voter Law Coalition is joined by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the League of Women Voters of the City of New York, Common Cause New York, and Make the Road New York in issuing the following 12 recommendations to help ensure that every eligible city resident is registered to vote when interacting with city agencies subject to the Pro-Voter Law.
Click here to download the report.
High Road Workweek Partnership Invites Employers to Adopt a Fair Workweek
High Road Workweek Partnership Invites Employers to Adopt a Fair Workweek
As more retailers declare nationwide reforms to their scheduling practices – from ending on-call scheduling to providing greater advance notice – there is increased industry interest in...
As more retailers declare nationwide reforms to their scheduling practices – from ending on-call scheduling to providing greater advance notice – there is increased industry interest in understanding the impact of difficult work schedules on employees. Leading-edge employers are also starting to quantify the down-stream effects of ever-changing work schedules and excessive reliance on part-time staff, including higher turnover, chronic absenteeism, lower productivity, and unsatisfactory customer service. Many industry leaders now recognize that predictable, stable and flexible work schedules are not just good for employees, but are essential to meeting operational, sales and growth objectives.
At the Next:Economy summit, the Center for Popular Democracy’s Fair Workweek Initiative will unveil the High Road Workweek Partnership, a groundbreaking approach to the future of work, which meaningfully incorporates employee voice and scheduling equity values into scheduling technologies and management practices.
Achieving a High Road Workweek involves three key components:
A Partnership of Core Stakeholders: With a 360 degree view from engaging diverse stakeholders, employers can assess the impact of their current scheduling practices and envision a sustainable workweek;
The High Road Workweek Pledge: Translates core business principles into specific scheduling practices that encompass: Predictability and Stability, Adequate Hours, and Employee Input and Flexibility, and Equal Opportunity and Mobility; and
Measurable Implementation and Assessment: Innovative scheduling technologies, guidance for managers, and clear metrics will facilitate implementation of the pledge, while ongoing feedback from employees and a research-based assessment will ensure that new policies deliver the intended outcomes.
The High Road Workweek Partnership delivers lasting scheduling solutions and provides a framework for employers who want to be strongly positioned in the global economy, leveraging the latest technologies and integrating corporate social responsibility into workforce management to create meaningful employment.
“Employers of our country’s hourly workforce are at a crossroads. The worrisome scheduling trends that have come to public attention are persistent and challenging issues that affect both workers and the longevity of a company’s success. Through a meaningful collaboration with employees, a commitment to core scheduling principles, and an innovative use of workforce management metrics, any business is capable of implementing a high road workweek,” says Carrie Gleason, Director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy.
Professor Susan Lambert of the University of Chicago, a key architect in developing the framework for scheduling stability, says, “While this year marks tremendous progress in employers recognizing the costs that lean staffing and unpredictable scheduling has for both workers and business, employers will need to implement new metrics for their managers and find ways to incorporate more employee input to ensure these commitments to reform become consistent scheduling improvements. The High Road Workweek Partnership presents an innovative approach to helping employers implement measurable standards for fair work schedules across their operations.”
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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.
www.fairworkweek.org The Fair Workweek Initiative, anchored by the Center for Popular Democracy and CPD Action, is driving the growing momentum to restore a workweek that enables working families to thrive. We are committed to elevating the voices of working people to ensure they can shape the solutions that work for their families – whether through improved industry practices or new workplace protections.
New York dedicates millions of dollars to help immigrants fight deportations
New York dedicates millions of dollars to help immigrants fight deportations
New York will soon offer free legal services for poor immigrants facing deportations, thanks to a new budget provision announced this week by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
The state’s 2017-2018 budget...
New York will soon offer free legal services for poor immigrants facing deportations, thanks to a new budget provision announced this week by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
The state’s 2017-2018 budget sets aside $10 million for expanding immigrant legal defense services, $4 million of which will go to the Vera Institute of Justice’s New York Immigrant Family Unity Project — a coalition of groups that seek to ensure that all undocumented immigrants have public defenders...
Read full article here.
The Federal Reserve Leaves Key Interest Rate Unchanged Amid Slower Job Growth
The Federal Reserve Leaves Key Interest Rate Unchanged Amid Slower Job Growth
The Federal Reserve announced on Wednesday that it will keep its benchmark interest rate at current levels in response to lackluster job creation in recent months and other discouraging economic...
The Federal Reserve announced on Wednesday that it will keep its benchmark interest rate at current levels in response to lackluster job creation in recent months and other discouraging economic data.
The decision will shield American consumers from higher borrowing costs, but it also reflects the fragility and unpredictability of the current economic recovery, some seven years after the Great Recession officially ended.
The central bank’s Federal Open Market Committee is keeping the influential target federal funds rate — the Fed-set interest rate banks charge one another for overnight lending — at a range of 0.25 to 0.5 percent. Since the rate is a benchmark for lending throughout the economy, leaving it unchanged will likely prevent higher interest rates on mortgages, car loans and other household debts.
The Fed has a dual mandate to craft monetary policy that both maximizes employment and keeps inflation in check. The FOMC lowers the federal funds rate to accelerate job growth by reducing borrowing costs. It raises the rate to limit price inflation by slowing the pace of job growth.
The FOMC’s decision not to do the latter in June was widely expected. Fed officials signaled earlier this month that disappointing job creation had undermined the case for a rate hike. The economy created just 38,000 jobs in May, and new data show that the preceding two months produced fewer jobs than previously believed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The central bank is also responding to tepid inflation. The price of consumer goods, excluding food and energy, rose 1.6 percent in the 12 months ending in April, according to the price index favored by the Fed — well below the Fed’s 2-percent target. And a University of Michigan survey revealed on Friday that U.S. households’ expectations of long-term inflation are lower than they have been at any point since the survey began collecting data in 1979.
In a press conference following the announcement, Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen acknowledged the role that those developments played in the central bank’s decision, noting that “recent economic indicators have been mixed.”
Yellen also said that the prospect of a “Brexit,” or British exit from the European Union, was “one of the factors” that led the central bank to hold off on an interest rate hike. The United Kingdom will vote on the country’s membership in the EU on June 23.
If the U.K. chooses to leave the EU, which functions as a single market, it could ultimately have adverse effects on the U.S. economic outlook, Yellen suggested. A higher percentage of British voters supported Brexit than opposed it in a poll released on Monday.
The Fed last raised the federal funds rate by one-quarter of a percentage point in December, the first increase since the financial crisis. The rate had been at or near zero — 0 to 0.25 percent — since December 2008.
With the December interest rate increase, the Fed seemed to express confidence that the economic recovery had entered a new phase, indicating it was time to pivot to the work of preventing inflation. Yellen predicted that the move would be the first in a series of small interest rate hikes that would gradually raise rates to levels that are more historically normal.
Since then, however, disappointing economic data have repeatedly delayed the pace of those increases. Slower global demand reduced the availability of credit, and wage growth remained sluggish, prompting the Fed not to raise the federal funds rate in March.
Fed officials suggested in May that economic conditions would finally permit them to raise the rate again in June. But the May job creation data, released on June 3, rapidly dashed those plans.
The central bank’s next opportunity to announce a rate hike will be July 27, after a meeting of the FOMC.
Wednesday’s announcement will come as welcome news to many progressive economists and activists who have long argued that the job market has much more room to grow before inflation becomes a serious problem.
While the official unemployment rate is 4.7 percent, much of its recent decline is due to people dropping out of the workforce altogether. The labor force participation rate, which measures the percentage of people actively seeking work in addition to those who are working, is significantly lower than it was in 2000.
In fact, when you exclude workers 55 or older who may have retired voluntarily, labor force participation is lower now than it was at its worst point during the past two business cycles, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.
A job market where people continue to give up on finding work is part of the reason wage growth has failed to meet expectations, since employers still have little reason to compete for workers, progressive economists argue. Average hourly pay rose 2.5 percent in the 12-month period ending in May, not enough for a significant boost in most Americans’ paychecks.
The Fed Up campaign, a coalition of progressive groups that advocates for Fed policy that is favorable to workers and communities of color, cites figures like those when pleading with the Fed to hold off on raising rates. Fed Up has called on the Fed not to raise the benchmark interest rate until “the economic recovery reaches all communities,” said Jordan Haedtler, Fed Up campaign manager.
Progressives were overjoyed when presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton expressed her sympathy with these concerns last month. The campaign said in a statement that as president, Clinton would appoint Fed officials who take seriously the central bank’s mandate to maximize employment, in addition to its duty to tamp down inflation.
Clinton stands to benefit politically from Wednesday’s announcement, since voters typically judge the candidate of the incumbent party for the economy’s performance. A rate increase would have squeezed economic demand, risking even slower job growth in the months ahead of the general election.
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has expressed a wide variety of views about the Fed. He most recently suggested that he supports low interest rates, but that he plans to replace Yellen as Fed chair.
Yellen said Wednesday that the central bank will act based on economic data in the coming months, even if its actions are perceived as affecting the general election in November. “We are very focused on assessing the economic outlook and making changes that are appropriate without taking politics into account,” she said.
This piece has been updated with Yellen’s comments.
By Daniel Marans
Source
Man with ALS confronts Flake on plane over tax bill vote
Man with ALS confronts Flake on plane over tax bill vote
A progressive activist who identified himself as diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's Disease (ALS) confronted Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) on an airplane this week over Flake's vote on the GOP tax-reform...
A progressive activist who identified himself as diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's Disease (ALS) confronted Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) on an airplane this week over Flake's vote on the GOP tax-reform bill.
Activist Ady Barkan, a staffer at the Center for Popular Democracy, questioned Flake on Thursday after the Arizona Republican voted in favor of the GOP tax-reform bill that passed the Senate in a late-night session last week. Videos of the 11-minute conversation were posted on Twitter.
Read the full article here.
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