Líderes del Congreso reanudarán negociación con la Casa Blanca sobre futuro de “Dreamers”
Líderes del Congreso reanudarán negociación con la Casa Blanca sobre futuro de “Dreamers”
Grupos como “United We Dream”, “Women´s March” y “CPD Action” reiteraron hoy que, en las próximas primarias, apoyarán a candidatos rivales que estén dispuestos a proteger a la comunidad inmigrante...
Grupos como “United We Dream”, “Women´s March” y “CPD Action” reiteraron hoy que, en las próximas primarias, apoyarán a candidatos rivales que estén dispuestos a proteger a la comunidad inmigrante, si los demócratas no cumplen su promesa a los “Dreamers.”
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Toys `R' Us Workers Go to Congress to Seek Curbs on Buyout Firms
Toys `R' Us Workers Go to Congress to Seek Curbs on Buyout Firms
“We need to fight for all workers who are being treated like the Toys ‘R’ Us employees, who are bearing the personal economic costs of corporate greed run amok,” Senator Gillibrand said on Tuesday...
“We need to fight for all workers who are being treated like the Toys ‘R’ Us employees, who are bearing the personal economic costs of corporate greed run amok,” Senator Gillibrand said on Tuesday in a meeting organized by Rise Up Retail and the Center for Popular Democracy, which represent retail workers. “I will keep doing everything I can in the Senate to make that happen.”
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Aldermen, Activists Propose City Ordinance To Raise Minimum Wage
Chicagoist - May 28, 2014, by Aaron Cynic - Supporters of raising the minimum wage introduced an ordinance at a City Council meeting today that calls for an increase to $15 an hour. The proposal,...
Chicagoist - May 28, 2014, by Aaron Cynic - Supporters of raising the minimum wage introduced an ordinance at a City Council meeting today that calls for an increase to $15 an hour. The proposal, backed by several Aldermen including John Arena, Joe Moreno and Roderick Sawyer, comes on the heels of a report released that shows a raise in the wage would benefit both workers and the City’s economy.
According to the plan, companies making more than $50 million a year would be required to first raise their minimum wage to $12.50 an hour within 90 days and then to $15 within a year. Smaller businesses would have to raise their wages at a more graduated rate, with a total of four years to get to $15. From there, the minimum wage in Chicago would rise with the rate of inflation.
“Study after study demonstrates that when you put money into the pockets of consumers, they spend it," Alderman Ricardo Munoz, who also backs the measure, told Reuters. "They don't hoard it in their mattresses.”
The recent report from the Center for Popular Democracy says a minimum wage increase would yield workers about $1.1 billion collectively, with an average annual income increase of $2,620 per individual. This would generate $74 million in personal income taxes to the state and yield $616 million in new economic activity.
At a press conference at City Hall, Tanika Smith, a fast food worker, said her current pay of $8.75 an hour, just 50 cents more than the minimum wage in Illinois, simply isn’t enough. “My car note is $500 a month, my rent is about $500, food is going up, lights are going up,” said Smith.
Raising the minimum wage is becoming a key issue with politicians statewide. Last week, Mayor Rahm Emanuel gave a panel of business, labor and civic leaders 45 days to draft a plan to raise the wage in Chicago. Gov. Pat Quinn has championed raising the state wage to $10.65 an hour, and Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan is pushing for a referendum on the November ballot to ask voters if the wage should be raised to $10 an hour.
Both the Illinois Chamber of Commerce and Illinois Retail Merchant’s Association oppose an increase to the minimum wage. “We think it puts us at a competitive disadvantage,” Chamber CEO Theresa Mintle told Reuters. The Retailers Association has said that raising the wage would force businesses to cut both jobs and hours.
Ald. Moreno, however, disagrees.
“It’s gonna hurt the people at the top possibly. It’s not gonna hurt business. It never has. Raising the minimum wage in the United States has never, ever hurt the broader economy...Our economy has been splintered with those at the top having way more. The middle class is shrinking. We want the middle class to grow.”
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Retail and restaurant workers have the worst schedules. Oregon plans to change that.
Retail and restaurant workers have the worst schedules. Oregon plans to change that.
In the next upcoming battle for workers’ rights, activists aren’t asking for more money or more time off. They just want workers to get a little advance notice about what their schedule will be....
In the next upcoming battle for workers’ rights, activists aren’t asking for more money or more time off. They just want workers to get a little advance notice about what their schedule will be.
Activists for better working conditions have scored victories lately. This year, 19 states increased their minimum wage — the result of a coordinated state-by-state campaign to take action on an issue that the federal government has basically ignored for a decade. And a handful of cities and states have passed laws requiring employers to offer workers paid parental leave.
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Commentary: I need the economy to give me a fair chance
Commentary: I need the economy to give me a fair chance
I'VE ALWAYS enjoyed talking with people, and, as long as I can remember, I wanted to work in the hotel industry. It's been my dream to work with guests at the front desk to make sure they have the...
I'VE ALWAYS enjoyed talking with people, and, as long as I can remember, I wanted to work in the hotel industry. It's been my dream to work with guests at the front desk to make sure they have the best experience possible.
As an African-American woman, I knew that lucky breaks weren't going to be handed to me, so I did everything I could to achieve my dreams. I went to school and got my bachelor's degree in hospitality and hotel management in 2000 from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
However, apart from a brief internship after college at the Best Western and a year at the Hilton working at the switchboard, which was almost a decade ago, I haven't been able to find work in my chosen field - a field in which I have a degree.
I've heard people say the recession is over because the unemployment rate is about 5 percent. But I can tell you that things are still really bad in the black community. Currently, unemployment for blacks is about 9 percent.
I've always been politically active and serve as the judge of elections in my voting district. So when I heard about a campaign that calls on the Federal Reserve to ensure that everybody gets decent paying work, including black folks, I was eager to join.
When I got my degree 16 years ago, the economy was in decent shape. Armed with my degree, the internship experience and good recommendations, I didn't expect to have any problems getting a job in a hotel. I applied to two dozen jobs and, after being turned down at all of them, I had to take other kinds of jobs in food service or customer service.
Finally, after many years, I got my switchboard job at the Hilton. Even though I was getting only $10 an hour, I was excited to finally be working at a hotel and thought I would just stay there and work my way up. But the recession hit in 2008, and I was laid off a year later.
That's when things became really tough. The recession hit African-American women, even college-educated ones like me, particularly hard. I've worked on and off since 2008, but finding good work has become almost impossible. At one point, I was traveling two hours each way to get to my job at a state-run liquor store.
I eventually had to quit when I suffered severe medical issues. I was diagnosed with a neurological condition and uterine fibroids, all within a matter of months. A couple of years ago, I was able to work again and joined a job skills program. The program placed me at a job where I work part-time - only 20 hours a week - as a cashier and food server at a university dining hall.
The unemployment rate apparently counts people like me as employed, even though I don't work enough hours to pay my bills. I'm overqualified and underpaid (I earn $11.25 an hour), but since I'm working - even though I'm still on Medicaid and food stamps - I'm used as evidence to say the recession is over.
Involuntary part-time unemployment is a more accurate figure to look at. It's over 15 percent for blacks! That's a whole lot of people who aren't making ends meet, but are still being counted as working.
People need to know that the Federal Reserve has incredible power over the economy and people's lives. It might seem very abstract, but it's not. If the Federal Reserve keeps interest rates low, the economy will continue to grow and people like me will be able to find full-time jobs or better paying work. If it raises rates because it claims the economy is doing well, it will be tougher for everyone to find jobs.
I'm going to Jackson Hole, Wyo., next week to join a protest against the Federal Reserve, which holds a symposium there every year. We want the president of the Philadelphia Fed, Patrick Harker, and the rest of the Fed, to see what regular folks go through beyond the numbers in the headlines.
Every week, I still go online to look for jobs at large hotel chains. I know that one of these days I will work at a hotel again. I just need the economy to give me a fair chance.
Salwa Shabazz lives in Philadelphia and is a member of the Fed Up campaign, an initiative of the Center for Popular Democracy.
By Salwa Shabazz
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American Legislative Exchange Council lobbyist being exposed
American Legislative Exchange Council lobbyist being exposed
Niccolo Machiavelli would have been proud of the folks who support the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). At the end of September the U.S. Department of Education approved another $245...
Niccolo Machiavelli would have been proud of the folks who support the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). At the end of September the U.S. Department of Education approved another $245 million in grants to eight states under the federal Charter School Program. That brings to nearly $4 billion in charters in the last two and a half decades.
The Center for Popular Democracy spelled out in its report “Charter School Black Hole” how tax dollars have gone to “ghost schools,” charters that never opened. In the case of schools that did open only to fail, there was no accounting for money spent or assets purchased.
There was no accountability to the school children affected by charter fraud, waste, and incompetence. Virtual charters like the K12 operation performed markedly worse. They are similar to fantasy football games — those that are bet on but are never physically played.
Scores of major companies have abandoned ALEC after protests from their stockholders and clients. Recently the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees wrote to the CEO of AARP urging that group to get out of the lobbying group. They asked that the senior citizens group stop “endorsing an organization that brings corporate lobbyists and elected officials from around the country together to write anti-senior, anti-family legislation in a process that locks out the public and subverts our democratic process.” Among other things ALEC has pushed for is repeal of the Affordable Care Act.
Enterprise, the largest car rental company in the world, owns Enterprise Rent-A-Car, National and Alamo, has moved away from the lobbying juggernaut. Part of the push to accomplish that divorce came from a petition by a petition with 89,000 signatures.
The company’s membership in ALEC, which has poured considerable resources into denying and minimizing scientific efforts to quantify climate change, was brought to the Guardian’s attention by the watchdog group the Center for Media and Democracy.
Growing concern about climate change has led many high-tech companies such as eBay, Expedia, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to abandon the ALEC ship. In 2015, environmental concerns pushed energy-industry giants, Royal Dutch Shell and BP, as well as the American Electric Power and the Canadian National Railway to quit.
A laundry list of model bills proposed in many state legislatures is very long — and very threatening.
For a listing of bills sponsored by ALEC, go to the website for the Center for Media and Democracy: www.alecexposed.org. Download the zip files of ALEC model bills for agriculture, energy, and the environment. Consider one such bill aimed at land use controls.
One bill would repeal all land use planning and zoning in rural counties by both county and state governments. Under the bill property could be put to any use, without regard for single-family, agricultural, or industrial zoning, or environmental land use restrictions. Under that restraint, no one could prevent a nude bar or body shop next to a school. Nor could local government prevent polluting industries from building in their jurisdiction.
If you want more information about the machinations of this cabal, simply contact Senator Josh Harkins and Representative Jim Beckett, who are chairmen of the Mississippi chapter.
In closing, consider these words from the ALEC website: “When states resort to tax carve-outs in a misguided attempt to grow their economies, they are ignoring the bigger problem — an uncompetitive tax climate. More fundamentally, government should budget for outcomes. This means identifying the core functions of state government and measuring results.”
Reviewing their handling of budgets and tax give aways in the past year, one can only wish they had taken their own advice.
TJ Ray is a retired professor of English at Ole Miss.
By Oxford Eagle Contributors
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Recaudan fondos para Puerto Rico con fiesta en el Museo PS1
El Museo de Arte Moderno (MoMA, por sus siglas en inglés) recibió en su sede en Long Island City a la comunidad artística puertorriqueña, en un esfuerzo de recaudación de fondos organizado por la...
El Museo de Arte Moderno (MoMA, por sus siglas en inglés) recibió en su sede en Long Island City a la comunidad artística puertorriqueña, en un esfuerzo de recaudación de fondos organizado por la sociedad civil en apoyo a la comunidad afectada por el huracán María.
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#FedSoWhite? Lawmakers complain about Federal Reserve's lack of diversity
#FedSoWhite? Lawmakers complain about Federal Reserve's lack of diversity
More than 120 members of Congress say the Federal Reserve has a striking diversity problem similar to the one that hit Hollywood's Academy Awards the past two years, and it's harming the economic...
More than 120 members of Congress say the Federal Reserve has a striking diversity problem similar to the one that hit Hollywood's Academy Awards the past two years, and it's harming the economic prospects of millions of Americans.
The lawmakers -- including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), as well as Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) and John Conyers (D-Mich.) -- wrote to Fed Chairwoman Janet L. Yellen on Thursday complaining about what they called "the disproportionately white and male" leadership at the nation's central bank.
"Given the critical linkage between monetary policy and the experiences of hardworking Americans, the importance of ensuring that such positions are filled by persons that reflect and represent the interests of our diverse country, cannot be understated," said the letter, signed by 116 House members and 11 Senators.
"When the voices of women, African Americans, Latinos, and representatives of consumers and labor are excluded from key discussions, their interests are too often neglected," said the lawmakers, who were all Democrats except for Sanders, an independent running for the party's presidential nomination.
The diverse group of House and Senate members praised Yellen, the first woman to lead the Fed, for her "strong leadership" and efforts to help raise wages while combatting economic inequality.
But they said the Fed had failed to fulfill its statutory obligation to “represent the public, without discrimination on the basis of race, creed, color, sex, or national origin" and called on Yellen "to take steps to promptly begin to remedy this issue."
All five members of the Fed Board of Governors are white and three are men.
All 10 voting members this year of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the monetary policy-setting body that includes Fed governors and a rotating set of regional Fed bank presidents, also are white and six are men, the letter said.
In addition, 11 of the 12 regional Fed bank presidents are white and 10 are men, with no African Americans or Latinos.
When the voices of women, African Americans, Latinos, and representatives of consumers and labor are excluded from key discussions, their interests are too often neglected.
— Letter from lawmakers to Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet L. Yellen
Regional presidents are appointed by the directors of each Fed bank. The Fed's Board of Governors in Washington approves the appointments.
In addition, the lawmakers cited a recent study by the Center for Popular Democracy, a worker advocacy group, that said that 39% of all regional Fed bank directors came from financial institutions, while 11% were from community, labor or academic organizations.
Fed spokesman David Skidmore said the central bank was "committed to fostering diversity -- by race, ethnicity, gender, and professional background -- within its leadership ranks."
The Fed's board has "focused considerable attention in recent years" on recruiting regional bank directors "with diverse backgrounds and experiences," he said.
Minority representation on the boards of Fed banks and branches increased to 24% this year from 16% in 2010, he said. And the proportion of women directors increased to 30% of the total from 23% during that period.
In a blog post in January, the former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Narayana Kocherlakota, raised concerns about diversity on the committee that sets monetary policy.
“There is one key source of economic difference in American life that is likely under-emphasized in FOMC deliberations: race,” he said.
Kocherlakota reviewed committee transcripts from 2010, the most recent available, and said he found no references at meetings "to labor market conditions among African Americans,” even though their unemployment rate never dropped below 15.5% that year.
The lawmakers cited Kocherlakota's post, calling it "unacceptable that discussion of the job market for these populations would be an afterthought, or worse, ignored entirely, and we are concerned that the lack of balanced representation may be a significant cause of this oversight."
Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.), who signed the letter, pressed Yellen at a House hearing in February to consider "getting an African American, for the first time in history, to be a regional president of a Federal Reserve bank."
Yellen said she "absolutely" would and regretted there hadn't been such an appointment.
"It's our job to make sure that every search for those jobs assembles a broad and diverse group of candidates," Yellen said.
The lawmakers said they appreciated her concern about diversity but urged her to do more.
Connie Razza, author of the Center for Popular Democracy report, said the large number of lawmakers who signed the letter showed that support is growing for changes at the Fed to make sure "the economy works for all."
The center coordinates Fed Up, a coalition of labor, community and liberal activist groups that has organized protests outside FOMC meetings urging central bank policymakers not to raise a key interest rate until the job market is stronger.
By Jim Puzzanghera
Source
Many Women Are Hidden From Unemployment Numbers, Study Says
Buzzfeed - 05.21.2015 - Randa Jama, a wheelchair...
Buzzfeed - 05.21.2015 - Randa Jama, a wheelchair attendant at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, would be referred to as a “voluntary” part-time worker in the jobs data produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). She only works weekends, spending weekdays caring for her children, in large part because she couldn’t afford a babysitter without much better hours and pay.
Though Jama says she would prefer to be working full-time, that information doesn’t filter through to the nation’s monthly employment report. The same goes for many other workers — almost a million, mainly women, one advocacy group estimates — who can’t work the full-time hours they want to, and aren’t classed alongside other unemployed or underemployed people in official data.
The distinction comes from a question, asked as part of the BLS population survey, about underemployment caused by “economic” or “non-economic reasons.” It classes factors like child care as non-economic reasons people aren’t working more hours - and commonly refers to these workers as “voluntarily” part time.
“The number of people working part time for economic reasons is a closely watched economic indicator,” reads the interviewer’s manual for the survey, as “a measure of underemployment and of the inability of the nation’s economy to generate the types of jobs desired.”
Those working part-time for “non-economic reasons” (sometimes referred to as “voluntarily” part-time) are not watched the same way.
“They reflect personal, rather than business, reasons for working part time,” the manual says. It means measurements of the economy’s ability to create full-time work could be overlooking many part-time working women who are not working full-time because of a lack of child care, or other family obligations.
Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, argues that while the terminology “economic” and “non-economic” is correct, describing workers in need of child care as “voluntarily” part time is misleading.
“What we’re trying to measure is the strength of the economy,” Baker told BuzzFeed News. “For that, they’re asking the right question: ‘If the economy were stronger, would these people have jobs?’ But if the economy were stronger and these women still didn’t have child care, they still wouldn’t be working full-time.”
Baker said the unemployment numbers also don’t account for women who would like to be working full- or part-time, but aren’t actively looking for work because they can’t afford child care. Similarly, workers who are part-time because of transportation issues — such as an inability to get to and from jobs in the suburbs — would be counted as “voluntarily” part time for “non-economic reasons,” despite wanting full employment.
A recent study by the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), a liberal advocacy group, estimated about a million women want to work full-time but can’t due to these “voluntary” reasons.
“In theory the economy could be robust enough where these women could have their needs met,” said Aditi Sen, a CPD researcher who co-authored the study. Policymakers may put less focus on full employment for women, she argued, if the official statistics don’t include their desire for full time work.
Justin Wolfers, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and professor at the University of Michigan, said that the BLS isn’t hiding any data.
“There’s no doubt that above and beyond the people we count as unemployed there is slack at a number of margins,” he said, giving the example of jobless workers who are not actively seeking work but who would take jobs if they were offered them. This group is also not included in the top-line numbers of the jobs report.
Wolfers said the BLS publishes extensive data and statistics on those margins, adding that the CPD report may not be a “reflection on the current moment, but something that’s been going on.”
Karen Kosanovich, an economist with the Current Population Survey program at the BLS, said the survey asks those who are working part-time for non-economic reasons if they would prefer to be working full time, but their answers are not released with the jobs report data.
“The reason for part time work and the desire for full time work are separate,” said Kosanovich. “They’re asked in separate questions, and we don’t have any tables that include that [latter] information.”
The last time the BLS population survey questions were revised was back in 1994. New questions helped capture a population of workers that previously went unrecorded.
“The biggest thing the new questions caught were women and men working at the part-time margin, especially women doing work outside the home,” said Brad Hershbein, a visiting fellow at The Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institute.
Both Hershbein and Baker said adding new questions in the BLS survey could help capture the growing share of contemporary workers with irregular schedules — such as those moonlighting as an Uber driver for 15 hours a week. They could show more people in the workforce working part-time — with ramifications for overall data on unemployment — just like the questions added in the ’90s did.
“They made these changes [to the survey] to keep up to date with who’s working and what work looks like now, but they haven’t updated it in 20 years,” Hershbein said. “And it turns out the way they asked the questions increased the labor force participation.”
Source: Buzzfeed
Black leaders in Pittsburgh echo frustration voiced across nation
Black leaders in Pittsburgh echo frustration voiced across nation
Pittsburgh could easily become the next Dallas as frustrations in poor black neighborhoods continue to mount over perceived economic inequalities and mistreatment by police officers, black...
Pittsburgh could easily become the next Dallas as frustrations in poor black neighborhoods continue to mount over perceived economic inequalities and mistreatment by police officers, black community members said Friday.
They condemned the attacks in Dallas that left five officers dead and seven officers and two civilians wounded.
They attributed the shootings to escalating frustration over socio-economic conditions in poor neighborhoods and repeated incidents across the nation in which officers were caught on video using deadly force to subdue minorities.
“These things will fester and grow and grow and grow,” said Connie Parker, president of the Pittsburgh branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “It's Texas right now, but it can be Pittsburgh next week.”
T. Rashad Byrdsong, president and founder of Community Empowerment Association, a Homewood-based nonprofit, said police officers have become a whipping post for deep-rooted problems beyond their control.
“The real problem is the inability of our public officials to sit down and come up with some comprehensive plan on how to include everybody in this democratic process,” Byrdsong said.
Pittsburgh has had its share of high-profile incidents. The most recent in January — the fatal shooting by Port Authority police of Tyrone Kelly Jr., a 37-year-old homeless man who fatally stabbed a police K-9 dog — drew protests. Police killed Kelly while attempting to arrest him for drinking beer on Port Authority property after he stabbed the dog.
In April 2009, Officers Eric G. Kelly, Stephen J. Mayhle and Paul J. Sciullo II were killed by Richard Poplawski while responding to a 911 call about a domestic disturbance at his Stanton Heights home
Pittsburgh police Chief Cameron McLay was in Washington for a conference when news of the Dallas shootings broke Thursday night. He and his command staff returned to Pittsburgh immediately to begin reaching out to community leaders. He said he was worried about the mood he'd find when he returned to the city Friday morning.
“I expected to find the atmosphere more tense,” he said, adding that city officers remain positive. “I'm really, really proud of them.”
Officers across Allegheny County said that it was impossible not to react emotionally to the massacre in Dallas. A Pittsburgh officer directing traffic Downtown called the mood somber but professional.
Malik Bankston, executive director of the Kingsley Center in Larimer, praised McLay and Mayor Bill Peduto for initiatives to improve relations between police and residents.
“To me, that's sort of the heart of the challenges we have right now, this whole idea of building trust,” Bankston said. “That's very unglamorous, thankless work that's only going to be realized over time, but there has to be a commitment from the highest level.”
Tim Stevens, chairman of the Black Political Empowerment Project in the Hill District, said Dallas is a pivotal moment for the nation to begin bridging a racial divide.
He said the majority of black people are horrified by violence directed toward police, but they also feel the justice system is weighted against them. He called on political and community leaders and residents to unite in an effort to find solutions.
“We have a lot of work to do,” he said.
Greensburg police on its Facebook page said that “no police officer wakes up in the morning wandering who they can shoot today. Realize that none of us are perfect, but we certainly strive to be the best that we can.”
By Bob Bauder & Megan Guza
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6 days ago
6 days ago