Campaign News

The Wall Street Journal - November 14, 2014, by Pedro Nicolaci da Costa - Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen met Friday with a coalition of community activists who are urging the central bank to resist pressures to raise interest rates before the labor market has fully recovered and calling for greater public input into the selection of regional Fed bank presidents.

At a press briefing outside the Fed before the meeting, organized by the Center for Popular Democracy and featuring workers, community organizers and liberal economists, the activists said the idea that the economy was close to full recovery was belied by the joblessness and underemployment of millions of Americans.

“We’re here to launch a national campaign for a stronger economy and for a reformed Federal Reserve,” said Ady Barkan, staff attorney at the center, a left-leaning national nonprofit organization. “The economy is not working for the vast majority of people,” he said, citing high unemployment, inequality and large racial disparities.

The Fed declined to comment on the meeting or the activists’ recommendations.

The Fed last month ended its bond-buying program aimed at supporting economic growth, citing “substantial improvement” in the outlook for the labor market. Those present at the briefing said the experience of many communities across the country suggests otherwise.

One of their biggest complaints was the inability of workers to find full-time work, a problem that has worried Fed officials and suggests the job market is still some way from full health.

“My job used to be steady, something you could count on,” said Jean Andre, 48, of New York, who works on logistics in the film industry. “I’m one of the names at the end of the movies that nobody reads. But I’m underemployed, I just can’t get full-time work anymore, not like I used to before the crash.”

With the unemployment rate 5.8% in October, Fed officials are debating when to begin raising interest rates from near zero. Many investors expect the central bank to start raising its benchmark short-term rate sometime in the summer of 2015.

Josh Bivens, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute in Washington, noted that black unemployment is generally double the overall level. Black communities would be among those hit hardest by potentially premature Fed rate increases, he said.

The activist group also called for greater public input into the selection of the presidents of the Fed’s 12 regional banks. This comes ahead of the retirements next year of Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher and Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser. The two have been some of the most vocal opponents of aggressive Fed efforts to reduce unemployment—such as holding short-term rates near zero and buying bonds to lower long-term rates–arguing such policies risk fueling excessive inflation and asset bubbles while doing little good for the economy.

Fed presidents are selected by the boards of directors of the regional Feds, with the approval of the Washington-based Fed board of governors. The regional boards are composed of bankers, business executives and community representatives,

Kati Sipp, a director of the Pennsylvania Working Families Party who spoke at the briefing, said many of the regional bank board members designated as community representatives are not truly representative of the communities they are supposed to serve. “Right now in Philadelphia we have Comcast CMCSA +0.10% executives that are representing the public, and we think that it’s important for us that real people are also representing the public in Federal Reserve policy making.”

Michael Angelakis, vice chairman and CFO of Comcast Corp., is deputy director of the Philadelphia Fed’s Board.

“In Philadelphia we’ve had an 8% average unemployment rate for this year and it’s a 14.5% unemployment rate for the black community,” Ms. Sipp said. If Mr. Plosser believes the economy is back to full health, she said, then he hasn’t visited many of his own city’s troubled neighborhoods. “If he had, he would not believe that our economy has really recovered.”

Mr. Plosser has said he believes the job market is close to full employment and the economic recovery is genuine, if unremarkable.

The Philadelphia Fed announced Friday that Korn Ferry KFY -0.15%, the executive search firm hired to conduct the search for a new president, established an email address “to receive inquiries.” Asked if the move was in response to the protests, a spokesperson said it was “one part of our broad search process.”

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A lack of transparency and inadequate oversight can set up the potential for waste, fraud, and abuse.  A  2015 report from the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools and the Center for Popular Democracy, entitled “The Tip of the Iceberg,” reported over $200 million lost to fraud, corruption and mismanagement in charter schools.

Read the full article here.

The Chronicle of Higher Education - April 28, 2014, by Paul Basken - The State University of New York’s Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government is backing away from a politically divisive report critical of a worker’s-rights law, admitting that the industry-financed analysis has multiple major flaws that undermine its central finding.

The report, published in February, criticizes New York State’s so-called Scaffold Law, which holds contractors and property owners legally liable for on-site injuries and accidents. The analysis suffers from "really big weaknesses," said the institute’s director, Thomas L. Gais, who added that he considers the report as not officially a product of his institute. The key analytical section of the report "is just really awful," he said.

The Rockefeller Institute prides itself as a provider of unbiased and empirical policy analysis. Defenders of the Scaffold Law, however, have complained that the institute tainted itself by accepting an $82,000 payment from a business group with construction-industry supporters to produce the report.

The report is "junk" and "fundamentally biased," said the Center for Popular Democracy and the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, two groups representing unionized workers and immigrants.

The case has shined a spotlight on the question of whether universities and their research institutes, as declining public financing leaves them increasingly reliant on private-sector support, are able to provide policy makers with objective technical advice.

There are hundreds of such institutes at universities around the country, and it’s often possible to "predict the policy outcomes from where their support comes from," said Sheldon Krimsky, a professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University who writes about bias in research.

A ‘Quality-Control Issue’

Mr. Gais, a social scientist who has led the Rockefeller Institute for four years, adamantly denied there was any bias in the report on behalf of the Lawsuit Reform Alliance of New York. The alliance has long opposed the Scaffold Law, but Mr. Gais said he never expected to get any repeat business from the industry-affiliated group. "We got the money no matter what we wrote," he said.

The report instead suffered from what Mr. Gais called a "quality-control issue," in which a relatively new institute researcher, Michael R. Hattery, delivered it to the Lawsuit Reform Alliance without its being thoroughly reviewed at the institute.

Another major problem with the 89-page report, Mr. Gais said, lies with a section that uses a flawed statistical analysis to make the "counterintuitive" argument that New York’s worker-safety law actually leaves workers less safe.

That section’s author, R. Richard Geddes, an associate professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell University, also has drawn criticism within his own institution. At least two members of the labor-studies department at Cornell wrote newspaper op-eds criticizing Mr. Geddes’s work.

One, Richard W. Hurd, a professor of industrial and labor relations, wrote that Mr. Geddes had "misused sophisticated statistical techniques and produced inaccurate results." Lee H. Adler, an instructor of labor and employment law at Cornell, wrote that the episode reflects more than a century of attempts by business leaders to deprive workers of the fundamental right to sue.

Mr. Geddes emotionally denounced the criticism in an interview with The Chronicle, saying he had absolutely not been influenced by the source of money and describing his work as a state-of-the-art analysis of who actually gets injured on construction sites in New York State.

"I find that offensive, I find that deeply offensive, that they said my work is biased, after we spent hours and hours collecting the best data we could find," Mr. Geddes said.

A Valid Concern

Among its arguments, the report compares worker-injury records in New York and Illinois, which repealed a similar worker-protection law in 1995. The study found that both accident rates and costs declined in Illinois after repeal.

The labor groups said the study’s shortfalls included a failure to take into account situations where higher union-membership rates would encourage workers to report accidents, and workplaces where greater percentages of immigrants might depress reporting statistics.

Mr. Geddes said the critics bore the responsibility of showing how such factors would substantially have affected the report’s conclusions. Mr. Hattery said he also stood by the report but recognized that the possible effect of those omissions was a valid concern that should be assessed in future studies.

Mr. Geddes said he recognized some drawbacks in a system where academic institutes rely more heavily on private supporters. "It has made it harder because people without any evidence at all, any support, are attacking, are saying you’re biased," he said. "I find that profoundly offensive."

Mr. Hattery, however, said he welcomed the process now unfolding. "I don’t at all resent or have a problem with these kinds of questions’ being asked," he said. "When you think you have integrity and are humble and a good conscience, you’re probably in trouble."

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Comunidad Y Trabajadores Unidos - July 15, 2014 - El debate sobre los derechos de migrantes parece estar tan polarizado y por eso no vimos mucho progreso en la reforma migratoria ni en asegurar los derechos de los trabajadores. En Nueva York podemos ver cambios que muestran algunas oportunidades para los migrantes a nivel estatal. En este programa vamos a enfocarnos en dos de los cambios: la legislación que ofrece ciudadanía en Nueva York y el avance de cooperativas de trabajo para trabajadores.

Ciudanía en Nueva York

Hasta ahora el debate sobre la reforma migratoria solo pasó a nivel federal pero la legislación que se desarrolló recientemente, trajo el debate a nivel estatal. La legislación que se desarrolló ofrece ciudanía para en Nueva York para los migrantes y Andrew Friedman habla sobre el significado de esta ley. Andrew Friedman es el co-director del centro de democracia popular y es parte del movimiento que empuja para esta legislación. Friedman habla sobre por qué Nueva York debería desarrollar una legislación que ayude a los migrantes y sobre el papel importante que juegan los migrantes en Nueva York.

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