Campaign News

In just two years, more than 13 million workers have received a raise, most notably in Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Massachusetts and just last month in New York, where wages for fast-food workers were raised. 

Work strikes and broad-based mass mobilizations are inspiring and filling a much-needed void. This worker-led movement is stepping in where the federal government has failed. 

Nearly 50 percent of workers earn less than $15 an hour and 43 million are forced to work or place their job at risk when sick or faced with a critical care giving need. When Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Jim Webb, Martin O'Malley, and Lincoln Chafee take the stage in Las Vegas on Tuesday night for the first Democratic presidential debate of the 2016 election, will they be addressing this powerful and significant constituency?

Will they provide relief for working families by presenting real policy solutions that go to the core of what it means to thrive? Or will they trade sallies and barbs in a bid to prevail in a popularity contest, overshadowing the experience of millions of working families in America?

Democratic contenders are likely to lament the fate of a declining middle class squeezed by the rapacious appetites of the 1 percent. This is important, but the candidates will also need to focus on ensuring that the middle class grows through a fair minimum wage, and struggling American workers, many of whom are women and people of color, can take paid sick time off without being penalized.

Not in recent decades have we seen such a vibrant backdrop of resistance and organizing around wages and workers' rights in this country, and Democratic candidates must not squander this golden opportunity to raise awareness around these issues and set an agenda that goes to the heart of what Americans need.

And the workers have been heard: a $15 minimum wage has been passed in the nation's largest cities. In addition, laws raising the minimum wage to more than the federal standard of $7.25 an hour have passed in a number of states and cities. There are now campaigns to raise the floor and standards for workers are being led in 14 states and four cities.

We've seen how lives can change when workers are paid a salary allowing them to make ends meet. Unable to adequately provide for her family on $9 an hour, health-care worker and single mother Sandra Arzu is one of the workers who fought fora $15 minimum wage in Los Angeles. The raise will fundamentally change her life and ability to put food on the table for her family and pay the rent.

Higher wages are vital to improving the lives of low-wage workers but it's not a cure-all. It's also important for low-wage workers to have access to paid sick days to take care of themselves and their families without fear of retribution. A Center for Popular Democracy report published earlier this month reveals 40 percent of surveyed Starbucksworkers reported facing barriers to taking sick days when they were ill.

The candidates need to address in a real way what workers must manage daily. Like a Starbucks barista from Washington State who describes coming to work sick out of fear she would lose her job if she took the day off. She says she rested on cardboard spread out on the floor so she could step in when there was heavy foot traffic in the store.

The federal government has an opportunity to dignify the lives of all workers in this country and address persistent inequality by enacting nationwide policies raising the minimum wage and enforcing paid sick leave. Millions of workers have issued a clarion call to the Democratic candidates and it's now their turn to respond with aggressive policy solutions to address the divide in this country.

We will be watching closely on Tuesday night to see if the candidates have heard the call from this key Democratic constituency — a constituency the Democratic party can't afford to lose.

Source: CNBC

NBC News - June 25, 2014, by Kat Aaron and Seth Freed Wessler - Leroy Samuels walked into the Varick Street immigration court in lower Manhattan, his wrists handcuffed and attached to a chain around his waist. “My heart is beating,” Samuels’ older sister Anneisha said from a courtroom bench as her father beside her, his head in his hands to hide tears. Samuels, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, nodded at his family and lowered his eyes.

Three days earlier, the 24-year-old had been in a New Jersey detention center preparing to appear at his first hearing alone. Immigrants facing deportation, like Samuels, aren’t eligible for court-appointed attorneys. And like most immigrants in his position, he couldn’t afford one on his own

“I found some lawyers online, but they asked for $4,000,” Anneisha said. “I just hung up.”

Without legal defense, Samuels was sure he’d be deported to Jamaica, the country where he was born but has not been for nearly 15 years since his father brought him to the U.S.

But Samuels arrived in court that December morning with an attorney anyway. He is one of 190 people facing deportation from New York City who have been provided a free lawyer through the Family Unity Program, a city council-funded pilot initiative that provides for two public defenders’ offices to hire lawyers to represent poor immigrants in detention. It's the first program of its kind in the country. Now city lawmakers are poised to expand it almost ten-fold, making New York City the first municipality to provide legal defense to all detained indigent residents facing deportation.

“Justice shouldn't depend on the income level of anyone,” says Judge Robert Katzmann, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, who convened a multi-year study group from which the pilot emerged. “I think that the project will create momentum for greater support for providing counsel for people facing deportation.”

A number of other cities, including Boston and Chicago, are exploring similar programs. And this year, Alameda County, California, which includes the cities of Oakland, Fremont and Berkeley, started a program that approaches New York’s.

“This is part of a trend,” says Raha Jorjani, the immigration attorney hired by Alameda County. “Public defenders are saying that until Congress acts to provide legal defense for immigrants in deportation proceedings, we at the county level have to do our part to mitigate harm to clients.

In recent years, more immigrants have found themselves in court as the U.S. government has deported and detained nearly 400,000 each year. Though not all people facing deportation are detained, those who get locked up, either because they were previously charged with a crime or entered the country without papers, are less likely to have an attorney to represent them and more likely to be deported. The two biggest factors in successfully resolving a case are having a lawyer and being free during the trial, according to a report by Katzmann’s group.

Preliminary data on the New York City pilot, which comes to a close on June 30th, shows that of 190 detainees, almost half have been released or have a legal case to argue for release. Some may still be deported but can now fight from outside prison.

Providing these immigrants with legal defense, Katzmann says, creates both fairness and efficiency, saving county and federal governments money they’d otherwise spend locking people up. “It's a benefit to the judge, it’s a benefit to the government and to the non-citizen. It's really an example of how the government process can be made better.”

For Samuels, the road to immigration court started with legal trouble in 2010. He’d been without a place to stay and was sleeping on a friend’s couch. The friend, Samuels says, asked him to hold onto a package of drugs. Samuels says police officers arrived at the apartment and arrested him. He pleaded guilty and was convicted of criminal possession of a controlled substance and sentenced to time-served, six days in jail.

Samuels and his family say he quickly straightened his life. He found a steady job at a pharmacy, stopped hanging with friends who sold drugs and made sure to see his son, who lived with his ex-girlfriend, at least twice a week. A year passed and then two. He thought the criminal case was behind him.

Then at around 8:30 one morning last December, as he walked home to his Brooklyn apartment after working the night shift, he was stopped on the street and arrested by federal immigration agents. He was placed in detention in New Jersey, facing deportation. Immigration attorneys say it’s not uncommon for officials to detain immigrants long after an arrest.

“I never really thought about being deported,” Samuels said this winter from behind glass in the visitation room at the Hudson County, New Jersey, detention center. “I had a good job. I had visits with my son. I was on my way,” Samuels said. He’d hoped to enroll in culinary school, but from detention, he saw his plans evaporating. And his live-in girlfriend was pregnant and due in May. “What if I’m not there?” he said.

“The first time that I visited my brother at Hudson,” Anneisha Samuels says, “I didn’t know what to do. It’s not like when people are arrested, regular arrested, and they get a lawyer.”

Anneisha had recently lost her job as a home health aide. Their father was between jobs, too.

The next day, Anneisha received a call from Talia Peleg of Brooklyn Defenders Services, one of three attorneys from her office working on the immigrant defense pilot program. (The Bronx Defenders office employs three others.) Peleg bore good news: She would represent Leroy in court free of charge.

“An attorney knows how to talk the talk and walk the walk,” Peleg explained recently. “And to translate these complex immigration issues into a narrative that makes sense to the court,” without a lawyer, “I don’t know if that would be possible.”

The program attorneys say their representation by no means guarantees that their clients will stay in the U.S. For people with many criminal convictions, there’s no viable legal argument to stay. Many of these people are subject to what's known as mandatory detention. For them, fighting to remain in America can mean months or even years in detention while their case winds through the system. Some opt to leave.

Diego Garcia, originally from Guerrero, Mexico, picked up several misdemeanor and disorderly conduct charges in New York. He was fired from a catering job and was drinking heavily.

Eventually, those arrests led to deportation proceedings. He landed in the Hudson County detention center, and then at the Varick Street Immigration Court, where he, too, met Peleg. He was so eager to get out of prison that he told her he just wanted to be deported, but she encouraged him to sit through a 35-minute intake questionnaire to see what his options might be.

It turned out Garcia was eligible for a U visa, a special visa for victims of crime–in his case, witness tampering. The catering company he’d worked for had paid him and others far less than minimum wage, according to the Department of Labor. Garcia’s lawyers say his employer then pressured him to lie to federal investigators who were at the time looking into workplace violations.

Garcia was thrilled to hear there was a possible path to staying in America.

Peleg explained that the visa—if it came through—would take months, and he'd have to stay at Hudson while they fought. Rather than wait in jail, Garcia accepted the removal order, and went back to Mexico. “I wanted to be free,” he said recently by phone from Mexico City, “and fight from there.”

“It's very hard to be incarcerated, waiting,” Garcia said “When you're there, you feel confused, fearful.”

Peleg and Garcia are in regular contact as she pursues his U visa. And he has some money to help him get through the wait. When Peleg contacted the Department of Labor, which had repeatedly fined the catering company, officials said they had more than $3,000 in back wages for Garcia.

According to New York City Councilwoman Julissa Ferreras, who represents several heavily immigrant communities in Queens, before the pilot project, she heard from families who spent thousands of dollars on immigration lawyers. “Often times it was money that these families didn't have,” she said. But no one was beating down her door demanding publicly-funded lawyers, she said. “My constituency didn't even know that that's what they needed to cry out for.”

Now, that’s changed. The families she talks to are getting help from attorneys whose sole focus is on immigration defense. “We're raising the level of justice,” Ferreras said.

The final draft of the budget, released by the city council Tuesday night, allocates $4.9 million to expand the program. Now, all poor New Yorkers facing deportation, both at Varick Street and nearby immigration courts in New Jersey, will be appointed an attorney.

Ultimately, the goal of the project’s advocates is to provide counsel for all migrants facing deportation in New York State, which would cost $7.4 million, said Peter Markowitz, who runs the immigration legal clinic at Cardozo School of Law, which has helped lead advocacy for the pilot program.

That price tag would be offset by savings for the state, which would spend less on health care and foster care for children whose parents are deported, according to a study by the Center for Popular Democracy, another group supporting the program. The private sector would benefit, too; New York State employers now lose an estimated $9.1 million dollars in turnover costs to replace detained and deported workers, the study found.

Nationally, it would cost just over $200 million to give a lawyer to every indigent immigrant facing deportation, according to one recent study. The federal government would save close to $175 million in detention costs, the study found.

In April, Leroy Samuels appeared in in the Varick Street court again. He walked through the doors in cuffs, and his sister and father sat in the same spot. His attorney had already made a deal with the federal government’s lawyer: Samuels would be granted release. After a short hearing, the judge warned Leroy not to get into any more trouble, and then told the now-25-year old that he could leave. In the courthouse cafeteria Samuels embraced his father and sister and thanked his attorneys.

Samuels’ return has been difficult. He says that he hasn’t been able to get his job back—his former boss told him the company isn’t hiring.

But weeks ago, his girlfriend gave birth to their son. The day he was released, Samuels said, “I feel like I got a fresh start because of these lawyers.”

Source.

“At a time when the Federal Reserve is starved for new, more well-rounded thinking, it is troubling that its opaque, secretive process for selecting its leadership could only yield a candidate cut from the same cloth as so many previous appointments: Wall Street and the highest echelons of corporate America. This was an opportunity for the Fed – especially the traditionally inaccessible Dallas Fed – to embrace a more transparent processes and to choose a president who can bring a new, more inclusive perspective that can foster a real recovery for communities in Dallas and beyond. Instead, the Dallas Fed selected a veteran of Goldman Sachs who is currently a director at the headhunting firm that was hired to fill this position. Neither the process nor the result serves the public interest. The Fed should do much better. 

“The process in Dallas has been especially worrying from the beginning. Outgoing President Richard Fisher convened a committee of former Fed presidents to advise on the selection process, in possible contravention of Dodd-Frank. There were reports of candidates being subjected to ideological litmus tests. The Dallas Fed shut out the Fed Up coalition – made up of community, labor, and consumer organizations – since December and refused to even acknowledge our simple requests for basic transparency, even as the Dallas Fed presidency remained vacant for the past 5 months.

“The self-dealing is reminiscent of the similarly opaque process in Philadelphia: Patrick Harker was a member of the very search committee that selected him as the next President of the Philadelphia Federal Reserve. The revolving door in the Federal Reserve continues to spin, with Richard Fisher leaving the Dallas Fed to work at Barclay’s Bank (which pleaded guilty to serious financial crimes), and a Goldman Sachs banker coming in.

“In the meantime, the people of Texas are still struggling with stagnant wages and enormous racial disparities. And the Fed still seems primed to intentionally slow down the economy later this year. With multi-millionaire Wall Street bankers in its highest leadership positions, how could the American people expect anything else?”

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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.

As for Ana Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher, the women who confronted him in the elevator, Flake said their intervention was “poignant,” but that he believed “some of their concern was how Kavanaugh would rule on the court. They may have been there prior to the allegations against him because of his position on some issues.”

Read the full article here.