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“Citing a 2013 report by the Center for Popular Democracy, Peralta said that between 2003 and 2011, three out of four victims in fatal construction accidents in the United State were immigrants or U.S.-born citizens of Latino heritage.“Among the cases investigated by [the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration] in New York state that number is 60 percent,” Peralta said. “In New York City it’s 74 percent. And in Queens it’s 88 percent.

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Wall Street Journal - March 3, 2015, by Pedro Nicolaci da Costa - A network of liberal activists is planning a series of small demonstrations outside of several Federal Reserve district banks Thursday, intending to highlight elevated unemployment among minority communities and urging officials not to raise interest rates any time soon.

Fed officials have indicated they plan to lift their benchmark short-term interest rate from near zero, where it has been since late 2008, sometime this year if the economy continues to strengthen as expected.

The activists say the nation’s 5.7% jobless rate understates the underlying weakness of the labor market, pointing to high long-term and black unemployment as symptoms of an economy that is still ailing. The unemployment rate for blacks was 10.3% in January.

“The Federal Reserve has the power–and responsibility–to foster stronger economic conditions that create opportunity for all communities,” the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank backing the demonstrations, said in a statement.

The activists are planning actions outside the regional Fed banks of New York, San Francisco, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Charlotte, N.C. (home to a branch of the Richmond Fed) and Dallas.

The Labor Department releases its February employment report on Friday.

Becky Moeller, president of the Texas AFL-CIO, said she and other community leaders have been frustrated by what they see as an opaque process for selecting the next Dallas Fed president. The current chief, Richard Fisher, is set to step down March 19.

Ms. Moeller said instead of getting a meeting with members of the Dallas Fed’s board of directors, which is in charge of the search, she and her delegation met with the bank’s general counsel in a session she described as not very helpful.

“This has been a comedy of pass the buck,” she said. “We don’t have a candidate—we’re just trying to talk processes.”

The Dallas Fed said it had recently met with the following groups regarding the search for a new bank president: Texas AFL-CIO, Texas Organizing Project, Jobs With Justice, Fort Worth Building Trades and Ironworkers, Workers Defense Project, Communication Workers of America, Dallas Central Labor Council, Harris County Central Labor Council and American Federation of Teachers.

“We had a productive conversation with representatives from these groups,” said James Hoard, a spokesman for the Dallas Fed. “We were interested in hearing their views on the selection of a new Dallas Fed president, and hope we were able to provide useful information to them, as well.”

The Center for Popular Democracy and the Fed Up Coalition, the umbrella groups coordinating the protests, expressed dismay at the lack of transparency in the selection of Patrick Harker as the new Philadelphia Fed President.

“Despite repeated requests from community, consumer, labor and academic organizations and public officials within the region, the Philadelphia Fed refused to create any mechanisms for engagement with the public,” said Kendra Brooks of Action United in Philadelphia.

“Instead, the process was entirely opaque: nobody outside of the Federal Reserve knew who the candidates were or what the criteria were for selection. This process did a disservice to the Federal Reserve System and the people of the Philadelphia region.”

The Philadelphia Fed said in response: “Several of our staff members did meet with members from Action United to hear their concerns. The Philadelphia Fed also provided them the opportunity to provide names of potential candidates to our executive search firm.”

The same group of activists showed up at the Kansas City Fed’s annual Jackson Hole symposium last summer and held a meeting with Janet Yellen at the Fed in November.

Last week, Ms. Yellen met with a group of conservative activists who argued the Fed’s low-rate policies were hurting rather than boosting employment.

The Great Recession has brought increased political scrutiny on the Fed, with prominent Republican and Democratic politicians calling for various changes in the central bank’s governance.

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As a muted telenovela played on a T.V. overhead, Jorge Roldan inched toward the microphone in a basement radio studio in Corona, Queens.

Speaking in Spanish, Roldan, a coordinator at the Laborers’ International Union of North America who is based in Long Island City, reminded his audience, mainly construction workers, that their bosses are obligated to give them respirators when they work on jobs involving airborne contaminants like asbestos.

“New York is an old city – many buildings have asbestos,” he said. “Wash your clothes in two different machines. The asbestos resist everything.”

His advice was standard fare for Sin Fronteras. Since April, the hour-long program has brought together six Latinos weekly to offer advice on a delicate topic for the Latino immigrant community: the exploitation and mistreatment of undocumented laborers.

Translated “Without Frontiers,” the offering is the only public-affairs program of 91.9 Radio Impacto 2, an unlicensed Spanish-language music station founded in 2008 that caters to the Ecuadorian population. Sin Fronteras focuses on worker-safety issues, but also promotes cultural events in the Ecuadorian and Latino community. Its guests have included Queens Assemblyman Francisco Moya and Ecuadorian Consul General Linda Machuca, among other local leaders.

More than 98,000 Ecuadorians live in Queens. Latinos account for over 27 percent of the borough population and are a nearly equal percentage of the construction workers citywide, according to a 2015 report by the New York Committee for Operational Safety & Health, a labor advocacy group. An investigation in 2013 by the non-profit Center for Popular Democracy found that between 2003 to 2011, Latino and/or immigrant workers made up three quarters of fatal falls at construction sites in New York City.

“We don’t want more of our people to die,” said Sin Fronteras’ founder, Rosita Cali, an Ecuadorian immigrant who also co-directs Padres en Acción, an organization in Jackson Heights that offers workplace safety trainings sponsored by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration – known as “OSHA classes.”

“Workers have to protect themselves,” she said. “They have the right to say, ‘no, I’m not going to go on that ladder.’ They have a voice and a vote.”

Juan, a 28-year-old Ecuadorian construction worker, represents the people the program tries to reach. An undocumented immigrant, he said he has been a construction worker since March and makes $17 an hour, nearly one-third more than in his previous job working in a kitchen. But about two months ago, he said, he started feeling sick after working with fiberglass insulation in a building in Brooklyn.

Juan said he asked his construction supervisor for a mask, but was told that there were none available.

“They told us that there weren’t any, that we would have to wait,” said the worker, who asked that his last name not be published. “The day went by, and then the week. How can that be?”

By the end of the week, he said, he had an obstructed sense of smell, body aches and a cough, which his doctor attributed to inhalation of fiberglass.

“When you remove the insulation, the dust rises – even your skin starts to sting,” said Juan.

Christina Fox, the work center coordinator for New Immigrant Community Empowerment, a non-profit based in Jackson Heights, said the Latino laborers she works with often don’t report injuries to their supervisors. She explained that workers might not think their injuries are severe enough or don’t know that they have a right to receive compensation.

Attending a workplace safety class could change this.

“A worker will be able to go to their job, recognize there’s a crack in the retaining wall, stop, and tell their supervisor,” she said. “But low-income workers don’t [always] have the flexibility to leave the job. A lot of workers might enter that risk situation.”

It’s a scenario that Sin Fronteras aims to address. Cali began pushing for more workers’ rights classes several years ago. When she heard in 2013 that the Ecuadorian Consulate was running out of space to host OSHA classes, she offered up the basement of her jewelry store and barbershop in Corona – the same basement where her program is now recorded.

For two months, she said, dozens of immigrants flocked to her shop weekly to learn about their right to report workplace accidents, regardless of legal status.

“When I saw how huge and exaggerated the demand was, I said, ‘this can’t be – we’re going to hold classes in other places,'” recalled Cali.

She created Sin Fronteras to expand the outreach. Like the majority of the hosts on the program, she doesn’t have professional radio experience, but the station’s owners immediately liked the idea of a program that seeks to help the community. The six hosts on Sin Fronteras are all volunteers and include a lawyer who specializes in construction accidents and the founder of Padres en Acción, Ronaldo Bini, who speaks about public-safety measures.

“Because people lack knowledge, they aren’t prepared and lose the chance to build their lives,” said Cali. “We want people to listen to the radio programs and come here and take OSHA classes, scaffold classes for workers’ protection.”

Maria Fernanda Baquerizo, the community relations coordinator at New York’s Ecuadorian Consulate, said that labor abuse is prevalent in the largely undocumented Ecuadorian community in Queens.

“It’s very positive that our community, our immigrants, can listen to important information of where to receive help,” she said. “Because generally the people who are abused at work, the undocumented, think that their employers can abuse them and not pay them wages… Immigrants feel helpless, they feel alone. They don’t know how to move forward.”

By Leila Miller

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The predominantly white male composition of Federal Reserve leadership is facing criticism from Democratic elected officials who believe the institution doesn’t adequately reflect the demographics of the nation it is meant to serve.

The legislators said in a letter to Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen on Thursday that central bank leaders also are drawn too frequently from business and financial backgrounds. The letter to Ms. Yellen received support from the leading Democratic candidate for the White House, Hillary Clinton.

Eleven senators and 116 members of the House of Representatives signed the letter, which was organized by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan. No Republicans participated, although they were given the opportunity to do so.

“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,” the letter said. “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.”

While the Fed has made “some progress” on diversity issues, the central bank has “considerable work to do” to comply with its legal mandate to represent the interests and diversity of the American people, the letter said.

The Fed said in a statement that it “is committed to fostering diversity—by race, ethnicity, gender, and professional background—within its leadership ranks.” It added that when it comes to the members of the regional boards, “by law, we consider the interests of agriculture, commerce, industry, services, labor, and consumers. We also are aiming to increase ethnic and gender diversity.”

The Fed also cited a rise in both racial and gender diversity on the regional Fed boards, with 46% of all directors now meeting the label of “diverse.”

In February, Ms. Yellen also addressed the issue in testimony to Congress, saying officials in Washington are “constantly attentive in its oversight of the reserve banks to the issue of diversity of representation on those boards. And it has improved considerably.”

The legislators’ letter follows a report earlier in the year from the Center for Popular Democracy’s left-leaning Fed Up Coalition, which took a look at the Washington-based Fed governors, regional bank presidents and boards of directors overseeing the 12 regional banks. That report flagged the fact that even as the Fed is now led by a woman, three of five current governors are men, and all are white. Of the 12 regional Fed bank presidents, 11 are white, two are women, and one is Indian-American. The last black person to hold a top leadership role at the Fed was Roger Ferguson, a vice chairman who left in 2006.

Fed governors are nominated by the president and are subject to Senate approval. Regional Fed bank presidents are nominated by their local boards by members representing firms not regulated by the central bank, subject to the approval of the Fed board in Washington.

The Clinton campaign said the central bank is indeed ripe for change. “The Fed needs to be more representative of America as a whole,” it said in a statement, adding that “commonsense reforms—like getting bankers off the boards of regional Federal Reserve banks—are long overdue.”

Much of the criticism over Fed diversity centers on the make-up of the regional bank boards of directors, which are populated by members of the private sector and oversee the operations of the Fed banks.

The makeup of Fed bank president ranks has been criticized for other reasons as well. The leaders of the New York, Philadelphia, Dallas and Minneapolis branches have all worked for investment bank Goldman Sachs in some capacity.

The Federal Reserve in recent years has faced criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. Many on the right have been angered by the central bank’s aggressive stimulus actions and its role in bailouts of the financial system, and some have wanted to audit the central bank’s process for making monetary policy and force the Fed to set policy based on an explicit and simple rule.

On the left, some have said the Fed has pursued policies that have promoted income inequality and the interests of the financial sector. The low level of diversity has become a more prominent concern in recent months in part because of the report from the Fed Up Coalition.

Meanwhile, former Minneapolis Fed President Narayana Kocherlakota said in a blog post in January that a lack of black representation at the Fed appears to have left central bankers insufficiently attuned to the economic troubles of the African-American community.

The Fed has become an issue in the presidential campaign. Last week, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump said he likely would replace Ms. Yellen if he were president. On the Democratic side, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont has long been a critic of the Fed.

By MICHAEL S. DERBY

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