Campaign News

Seventy-eight years ago today, the Fair Labor Standards Act made a groundbreaking promise to Americans: the promise of a fair minimum wage for an honest day’s work.

That promise, however, has eroded badly over time. In recent decades, the federal benchmark has grown increasingly obsolete, guaranteeing a bare minimum that is nowhere near enough to keep up with the growing costs of rent, food, and other essentials.

As calls for higher wages grow louder nationwide, it is imperative that federal officials take action to raise the federal minimum wage and renew the promise to American workers made nearly a century ago.

If the federal rate had merely kept up with inflation since its peak in the late 1960s, it would be nearly $11, one-and-a-half times today’s rate of $7.25. That rate has stayed stagnant since Congress last raised it in 2009. It is a remarkable number of years to go without an increase in wages, and workers have suffered for it.

In the absence of Congressional movement, states and cities have increasingly moved to give workers the raises they need. Yet entrenched forces at the federal level continue to stonewall, putting forth arguments that grow increasingly irrelevant by the day.

Many, for example, raise the specter of job losses. Yet cities that have raised their minimum wage in the past two years, from Los Angeles to Seattle to Chicago, simply have not seen the kinds of cataclysm that many warned about.

In fact, in Seattle, dozens of new restaurants have opened since higher wages kicked in – including many run by one of the fiercest critics of the increase. By the end of 2015, new permits for restaurants, coffee shops, and other food service establishments were on track to keep pace with or even surpass those issued in years past.

Another myth: higher wages would lead to higher prices - a bigger bill for a Big Mac, a pricier trip to Target. Yet here too, the apocalyptic predictions that precede wage increases fail to come true. In Seattle, the costs of groceries, gas, and retail have stayed stable over the past year - even though businesses warned they would need to hike prices if wages were to rise.

In recent weeks, some fast-food chains have made headlines by declaring they would replace employees with automated kiosks. Looking at the bigger picture, though, the overall risks of automation are low. Research just last year found that, while minimum wage increases can reduce some routinized jobs like cashiers, they also swell the number of more complex jobs like food preparation, resulting in an overall zero-sum change.

The fact is, raising the minimum wage gives local economies a boost by putting more money in the pockets of consumers. Higher wages also let businesses hold on to workers and improve customer satisfaction, all of which improve employers’ bottom line.

That’s why the majority of businesses actually support a higher minimum wage, despite the noise coming from groups like the Chamber of Commerce and the National Restaurant Association. A leaked memo earlier this year showed that 80 percent of business executives around the country support higher wages and paid sick days - and that they are coached to oppose those policies in public.

While powerful interests keep trying to muddle the debate, it’s clear that even a growing economy is simply not reaching millions of hardworking Americans. And it’s not just fast-food workers. A variety of workers receive less than $15: teachers, paramedics, home health-care workers, and many others. A recent study showed that even many manufacturing jobs – the foundation of the middle-class – pay less than $15, forcing the government to cover the gap with public assistance programs like food stamps and Medicaid.

As minimum wages affect more and more workers, it is no wonder that more Americans are starting to get on board. This year, dozens of cities and states – including some that lean deeply Republican – are considering increases. Colorado, Maine, Arizona and Washington State are all running ballot measures that would raise wages for close to two million workers in those states alone.  

Rather than focusing on a fantasy Armageddon that never comes, lawmakers in Congress would do well to embrace the need for better pay. In the meantime, states and cities will continue the fight to fulfill the pledge that the FLSA made so many years ago.

By JoEllen Chernow

Source

MIAMI — Not that long ago, part of my morning routine involved catching up on what states around the country were doing that day to crack down on illegal immigration.

That habit started in 2010, when Arizona passed a law empowering state police to enforce immigration laws. One by one, other states started following suit. Utah. Indiana. South Carolina. Alabama wanted to check the immigration status of children enrolling in its public schools. Georgia was so successful driving undocumented immigrants out of the state that it turned to prison labor to harvest its abandoned crops, a plan that quickly failed once the prisoners started walking off the job.

Then, something changed. Those laws started getting struck down in courts. Others states halted their efforts to pass Arizona copycat bills. And before I knew it, I was drinking my morning glass of orange juice while reading through articles about local efforts to make life easier for undocumented immigrants.

The most interesting of those efforts has been a push to provide local identification cards to undocumented immigrants. The idea is simple: A city or county creates a "municipal ID" that those immigrants can use to interact with city officials, identify themselves to police officers and even open bank accounts so they're not easy, cash-carrying targets for would-be robbers. The IDs aren't substitutes for driver's licenses or federally-accepted forms of ID — for example, you can't get through security at an airport or board a flight with one.

The number of places approving those IDs has surged in recent months, with Hartford, Ct., Newark, N.J., Greensboro, N.C., and New York City approving them.

The wave of cities adopting municipal IDs doesn't mean the country has suddenly turned completely immigrant-friendly. Just tune in to the next Republican presidential debate to see how many candidates are proposing mass deportations, cutting down on legal immigration channels and missile-firing drone patrols along the southwest border. Or watch as states try to crack down on sanctuary city policies within their borders.

But what the cities adopting municipal IDs show is that there may be a middle ground in the immigration debate that has been so incredibly polarized in recent years. On the one side, we had states like Arizona passing laws to go after undocumented immigrants. On the other, we had cities and counties like San Francisco adopting "sanctuary city" policies that have allowed some undocumented immigrants with violent, criminal backgrounds to walk free.

The reason we've seen that pendulum swing so wildly in opposite directions is that Congress and the White House have been unable to come together and fix our nation's broken immigration system. That's why millions of undocumented immigrants continue pouring over our southwest border. That's why millions of legal immigrants can stay in the country long past the time their visas have expired. And that's why Americans can continue hiring those undocumented immigrants with little fear of punishment.

What's left is a system that has effectively allowed 11 million undocumented immigrants to stay in the country. And whoever you blame for that, they've been left in a legal limbo that makes life incredibly difficult for them.

Take Rosana Araújo, an Uruguayan who visited Miami on a three-month visa 13 years ago and never went back. Araújo has spent her years here cleaning houses, warehouses, day care centers, whatever she could do to get by. But the 47-year-old said the fact that her only form of identification is her Uruguayan passport has made her life difficult in so many ways.

She can't use a public library. She can't get past the security desk of local hospitals to visit sick relatives or friends. She said she couldn't even return a pair of pants atWalmart because they insisted on a Florida ID card.

Most important, Araújo said she didn't call police after she was sexually assaulted in 2009 because she had heard from other undocumented immigrants who had been victims of sexual violence that they were caught up in immigration proceedings after reporting the crime.

"The first thing they do is ask for your identification. And the passport for them isn't valid," she said. "That makes you far more vulnerable that the police are going to pick you up for not having identification."

Now Araújo is helping several groups push government agencies in Miami-Dade County to adopt the municipal IDs. The Center for Popular Democracy, a group that advocates for immigrant rights, estimates that two dozen other cities, including Phoenix, New Orleans and Milwaukee, are now considering adopting the program

Municipal IDs won't solve our nation's immigration problem. But they just might be the best short-term solution to ensure undocumented immigrants aren't completely helpless as we all wait for Washington to find a solution.

HUD has a program that sells tens of thousands of troubled mortgages across the country, many in black and Latino neighborhoods hard hit by the housing crisis, to Wall Street speculators - at a discount!  Please let that sink in.

Since 2010, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has been auctioning off pools of very delinquent mortgages through a program they call Distressed Asset Sales Program, or DASP.  In most cases, the sales have gone to the highest bidder, which have been hedge funds and private equity firms.

Lone Star Fund, a private equity firm started by a Texas billionaire, and Bayview Asset Management, an affiliate of the private equity firm Blackstone Group, have been two of the primary beneficiaries of these sales. The result? Struggling homeowners lose their homes and speculators turn the properties into high-cost rentals that contribute to displacement in communities across the country.

This month, over 110,000 people from across the country signed a petition calling on HUD Secretary Julian Castro, to change this program. This comes on the heels of a March 1st letter to HUD from 45 members of Congress issuing a similar call for reforms to this mortgage sale program. In fact, for over two years, housing advocates and national policy groups have been pushing HUD to fix this program.

In an interview on WNYC Studio’s “The New York Radio Hour,” Secretary Castro referred to our protests that his program is enriching Wall Street as “sloganeering.” We wish that were the case. Unfortunately, it is simply a fact that 98% of the mortgages sold through HUD’s DASP program are going to Wall Street, one that can be verified on HUD’s own website where they post reports from these sales. Most, if not all, of these Wall Street buyers are what the industry itself calls “vulture capitalists” – investors that specialized in distressed assets in the hopes of making them more profitable and selling them for a profit.

In an effort to suggest that he has addressed the problem, Secretary Castro touts the agency’s 2015 auctions of troubled mortgages in which only non-profits were eligible to bid. Let’s be clear. Only 172 mortgages were sold to non-profits through these auctions, while a whopping 15,309 went to Wall Street investors in 2015. So yes, a gesture was made by the agency, but at such a miniscule scale he surely cannot suggest that the problem is solved.

There is no reason to sell such a high percentage of these loans to some of the same culprits responsible for the housing crisis in the first place. In fact, it seems to be in direct conflict with HUD’s mission to create strong, sustainable, inclusive communities and quality affordable homes for all. Call me skeptical, but I don’t trust a private equity firm like Blackstone – a company whose CEO made $734 million last year - to help fulfill that mission. Blackstone and other major speculators have a goal of making as much money as possible, and in the process are chipping away at the wealth and stability of neighborhoods in the process.

There is a viable alternative, that housing and civil rights groups across the country are calling for.  HUD should prioritize selling these loans to good actors that have a community-centered plan to save homes from foreclosure when possible and, when foreclosure cannot be avoided, to meet the affordable housing needs of the community with their property disposition plans.

A growing number of Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) have programs to do just this, and have raised the capital needed to buy pools of these delinquent mortgages.  But so far, they haven’t been able to get their hands on the number of mortgages that they can afford. HUD should do all it can to make sure CDFIs and other good actors are prioritized for these sales.

I have seen too many people in my community lose their homes and their wealth to Wall Street speculators. We cannot allow the same policies that ravaged our communities to continue. For me the choice is very clear: will Secretary Castro make sure that HUD helps families stay in their homes, or will he allow HUD to continue to sign over these loans to Wall Street and fuel neighborhood displacement?

It’s time for HUD to make the right choice and partner with non-profit CDFIs and other organizations that will keep our neighborhoods together. I encourage everyone who cares about the stability of neighborhoods across the country to join with me in calling on Secretary Castro and HUD to change the DASP program so that it prioritizes foreclosure avoidance and the creation of affordable housing.

By Ana Maria Archila

Source

“Of course not," Shawn Sebastian, co-leader of the Fed Up coalition of advocacy groups and labor unions, told Politico he opposes Williams in part because Williams has occasionally favored interest-rate hikes. Instead, Fed Up recommended a whole slate of “diverse” candidates for the New York Fed job, though their diversity is mainly limited to gender and skin color, not ideas. Many of them work or have worked for the Fed, while others served in various positions in the Obama administration; one is an economist for the AFL-CIO.

Read the full article here.