For Many Americans, the Great Recession Never Ended. Is the Fed About to Make It Worse?
When the Federal Reserve considers raising interest rates on July 28—and then again every six weeks after—MyAsia Reid, of Philadelphia, will be paying close attention. Despite holding a bachelor’s...
When the Federal Reserve considers raising interest rates on July 28—and then again every six weeks after—MyAsia Reid, of Philadelphia, will be paying close attention. Despite holding a bachelor’s degree in computer science, completing a series of related internships, and presenting original research across the country, Reid could not find a job in her field and, instead, pieces together a nine-hour-per-week tutoring job and a 20-hour-per-week cosmetology gig. The 25-year-old knows that an interest-rate hike will hurt her chances of finding the kinds of jobs for which she has trained, and earning the wage increase she so desperately needs.
A Fed decision to raise interest rates, expected sometime this year, amounts to a vote of confidence in the economy—a declaration that we have achieved the robust recovery we need. “We are close to where we want to be, and we now think that the economy cannot only tolerate but needs higher interest rates,” the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, told Congress during a July 15 policy briefing.
But for many millions of Americans, the recovery has yet to arrive, and for them, a rate hike will be disastrous. It will put the brakes on an economy still trudging toward stability; stall progress on unemployment, especially for African-Americans; and slow wage growth even more for the vast majority of American workers.
The general argument for raising interest rates is that it will prevent wage costs from pushing up inflation. However, there is no data suggesting price instability; nor is there any indication that wages have risen enough to spur such inflation. For the overwhelming majority of American workers, wages have stagnated or even dropped over the past 35 years, even as CEOs have seen their compensation grow 937 percent. During the same period, wage gaps between white workers and workers of color have increased, and black unemployment is at the level of white unemployment at the height of the Great Recession. Meanwhile, the labor-force participation rate is less than 63 percent, the lowest in nearly four decades, suggesting that many Americans have simply given up looking for work.
Yellen has herself often urged the Fed to look at the broadest possible employment picture. Yet, during her recent congressional testimony, shedownplayed the Fed’s ability to address racial disparities, saying that the central bank does not “have the tools to be able to address the structure of unemployment across groups” and that “there isn’t anything directly that the Federal Reserve can do” about it. She cited, rightly, a range of other factors, including disparate educational attainment and skill levels, that contribute to economic and social disparities between racial groups. But she also glossed over the importance of the economic environment in shaping workers’ unequal chances.
One defining metric in shaping workers’ chances is the unemployment rate. A high unemployment rate facilitates racial discrimination. When there are too many qualified job candidates for every job, employers can arbitrarily limit their labor pool based on unnecessary educational requirements, irrelevant credit or background checks, or straightforward bias. A tight labor market, by contrast, makes it much harder for employers to succumb to prejudices and overlook qualified workers simply because of bias. When the number of job seekers matches the number of job vacancies, African-Americans, Latinos, women, gays and lesbians, injured veterans, and formerly incarcerated workers finally get their due in the workforce.
The late 1990s, when unemployment was at about 4 percent, bear out this thesis. During that rosier era, black unemployment was 7.6 percent, and the ratio of black family income to white family income rose substantially.
As the guardian of monetary policy, the Federal Reserve has a number of tools for encouraging a tight labor market, and one of those tools is to keep interest rates low. By keeping rates low, the Fed creates a hospitable environment for job growth by lowering the borrowing costs for consumer and business spending—including hiring new workers. By contrast, raising rates deliberately suppresses spending by consumers and businesses. In the process, it slows job growth, holds down wages, and unnecessarily maintains racial disparities.
With so many workers still struggling, there is no need to cut off this recovery prematurely. Inflation remains below the Fed’s already-low 2 percent target, unemployment and underemployment are too high, and wage growth and labor-force participation are too low. In fact, the Fed should be doing everything within its power to keep nudging the recovery forward for the workers still caught in the slipstream of the Great Recession.
The Federal Reserve should not raise interest rates this week, nor when it meets again six weeks after that. It should not raise rates at all in 2015. Doing so would cause tremendous harm to the aspirations and lives of tens of millions of working families, and would disproportionately hurt African-Americans.
MyAsia Reid knows the difference that a full-employment economy can make. She is ready to participate in the economic recovery. And she will be watching as the Fed decides whether to hold to a strategy of strengthening the recovery or pursue a new strategy that jeopardizes her chances and her community.
Source: The Nation
The Anguish of Jeff Flake
Ana Maria Archila, one of the protesters who spoke to Mr. Flake on his way to the Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on Friday.
...
Ana Maria Archila, one of the protesters who spoke to Mr. Flake on his way to the Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on Friday.
Watch the video here.
Citizen Green: First Flint and New Orleans, then North Carolina
Citizen Green: First Flint and New Orleans, then North Carolina
Take it as a given that the state General Assembly will pass legislation to increase teacher pay when it reconvenes for the short session on April 25, albeit somewhere below the 5-percent raise...
Take it as a given that the state General Assembly will pass legislation to increase teacher pay when it reconvenes for the short session on April 25, albeit somewhere below the 5-percent raise Gov. Pat McCrory wants.
Improving teacher salaries is the kind of popular public policy the governor can take to the voters, in addition to the infrastructure bond referendum that passed last month, in his reelection bid. He’s the only one who will have to face voters across the state in November, but the ultra-conservatives in the legislature who are protected by gerrymandering owe McCrory big time after he signed HB 2.
But also expect the emboldened Republican super-majority to aggressively push through a legislative agenda that radically promotes for-profit education while punishing students in poor, low-achieving schools.
The NC School Board Association is closely monitoring a proposal by state Rep. Rob Bryan (R-Mecklenburg) to create a so-called Achievement School District. The proposal, released in the form of draft legislation in January, would yank five low-performing schools across North Carolina from the control of local school boards and place them under the administration of a statewide Achievement School District to be operated by a private company contracted by the state.
The model of states superseding local control of education by turning academically struggling schools over to charters was pioneered in 2003 in Louisiana, where it rapidly expanded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Tennessee followed suit in 2010, and Michigan got in the game in 2013. Parallel to taking control of local schools, the state of Michigan also placed the city of Flint in receivership, with disastrous consequences when citizens were exposed to lead poisoning from the water in Flint River. It should be obvious that opaque administration and lack of local accountability invites abuse and undermines democracy.
A study by the New York-based Center for Popular Democracy found that takeover districts in Louisiana, Tennessee and Michigan failed to improve test scores, while metrics were “altered from year to year, confounding accountability and transparency.”
The authors wrote, “Additionally, lawsuits and student protests demonstrate that when local oversight is stripped away, children may face harmful practices such as discriminatory enrollment, punitive disciplinary measures, and inadequate access to special education resources. Students suffer in the wake of high teacher turnover and personnel instability brought on by the rushed firing of staff. Finally, we find that a consistent lack of oversight can create an environment rife with fraud and mismanagement, where private interests gain financially while taxpayers, students and teachers are left behind. We conclude that takeover districts actually hinder children’s chances of academic success rather than improving them.”
As further warning that the Republican lawmakers intend to take away control and funding from public education, take it from Bryan Holloway, a former Republican lawmaker who now works as a lobbyist for the NC School Board Association.
A remarkable story published by the Elkin Tribune on March 30 quotes Holloway as telling the Elkin City School Board: “There could be numerous education bills go through in this short session you may not like at all.”
Last year, the state Senate approved legislation to shift funding from public schools to charters, including federal child nutrition funds, even though many charter schools don’t provide free lunch, prompting sharp criticism from many Democratic lawmakers. The House could move on the legislation and present it for Gov. McCrory’s signature in the short session.
If that’s not strange enough, the article also quotes Holloway as saying, “A bill to eliminate school boards throughout the state we’ve been told is going to be introduced. I don’t think it has legs to go anywhere, but because they are brazen enough to even be willing to file it means you’ll probably have to deal with it in the future.”
The General Assembly started down this path in 2014 when they passed a law to give every public school in the state a letter grade from A to F. Predictably, the schools that consistently earn Ds and Fs are the ones that serve communities with concentrated poverty.
Fortunately, teachers and principals see very clearly what our lawmakers in Raleigh are trying to do.
“They are putting a big red X on the schools that already have a big red X on them,” Michelle Wolverton, the principal at Hunter Elementary in Greensboro, told a few intrepid souls who braved the blustery cold for a Rally for Public Education at Greensboro’s Governmental Plaza on April 9. “They have a big red X on them because of poverty. They have a big red X on them because a high percentage of the students are immigrants. They have a big red X on them because of poverty and because the economics are not equal.”
by Jordan Green
Source
Thousands Today Say #WeRise To Reclaim Government For The People
Campaign for America's Future - March 11, 2015, by Isaiah J. Poole - At the office of Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner, more than 2,500 demonstrators, most wearing white “We Rise” T-shirts, staged a ...
Campaign for America's Future - March 11, 2015, by Isaiah J. Poole - At the office of Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner, more than 2,500 demonstrators, most wearing white “We Rise” T-shirts, staged a protest against cuts in Medicaid and other social services. In Albany, N.Y., more than 2,000 people marched to the state capitol to protest education funding cuts. In Denver, dozens of activists came out in support of immigration rights measures, including driver’s licenses for undocumented workers.
These are just a few of the dozens of actions that took place in 16 states today as part of “We Rise: National Day of Action to Put People and Planet First.” Local and national progressive organizations mobilized around different aspects of a common agenda that stood in opposition to the right-wing and corporatist policies pushed through state legislatures in these states. The actions were all broadcast under the Twitter hashtag “#WeRise.”
“What we saw today was a stirring of the democratic spirit,” said Fred Azcarate, Executive Director of USAction. “People are upset at elected officials who spend more time working for big corporations and wealthy campaign donors than representing the people they were elected to serve. Today, people rose up to reclaim government and demand that legislators work for them and their families.”
The states where We Rise demonstrations were organized also include Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The events were led by groups affiliated with National People’s Action, Center for Popular Democracy, USAction, and other allies.
“Apparently conservatives believe they have a mandate to give big corporations another free ride on the backs of everyday people,” said George Goehl, Executive Director of National People’s Action. “But they’re wrong. They have no such mandate. Instead, as we can see in the resistance to draconian policy or Chuy Garcia’s campaign to unseat Rahm Emanuel as Mayor of Chicago, there is a new brand of populism taking root in America. People are fed up with politicians doing the bidding of big money. They’re ready for leaders who will work for, not against, people and the planet.”
“Politicians working primarily on behalf of big corporations are making it harder and harder for families to get by,” said Ana María Archila, Co-Executive Director of The Center for Popular Democracy. “Our families won’t stand for this, and today thousands of workers and families raised our voices in state houses across the country to demand that elected officials join us in leveling the playing field so that each and every family can thrive.”
The Campaign for America’s Future is working with two of the organizations behind today’s “We Rise” events, National People’s Action and USAction, in sponsoring the “Populism2015″ conference in April, with the Alliance for a Just Society. One goal of that conference is to build political momentum from today’s events around a populist progressive agenda “for people and the planet.” Register for the April 18-20 conference in Washington through the Populism2015 website.
Report: Pa. Charter Schools Lost 30M to Fraud, Mismanagement
Daily News - October 1, 2014, by Regina Medina -THE STATE'S charter schools are out $30 million due to chicanery and waste since the 1997 charter-school law was enacted, according to a report...
Daily News - October 1, 2014, by Regina Medina -THE STATE'S charter schools are out $30 million due to chicanery and waste since the 1997 charter-school law was enacted, according to a report released yesterday by three grass-roots education groups.
The report, "Fraud and Financial Mismanagement in Pennsylvania's Charter Schools," was authored by the Center for Popular Democracy, Integrity in Education and Action United. It calls for, among many recommendations, a moratorium on new charter schools, changes to the oversight structure and legal protections "to encourage whistle-blowers to report instances of fraud."
The state's oversight of charter schools is "not effectively detecting or preventing fraud," the report says.
The charter-school law mandates general auditing techniques, which the report claims may find inaccuracies but won't detect abuse. The report urges that charter schools follow practices used by federal agencies and conduct targeted audits that look into high-risk areas.
The report adds that whistle-blowers within the charter organizations and the media have exposed the majority of fraud cases and suggested that oversight agencies increase staffing to adequate levels.
In Philadelphia, the district Charter School Office oversees the city's 86 charters. The office has five staffers and no director.
The report cites specific cases of fraud around the state including the following from Philadelphia:
* Two officials with the Philadelphia Academy Charter School, Kevin O'Shea and Rosemary DiLacqua, were convicted in 2009 of defrauding the school of more than $900,000. They submitted fraudulent invoices for personal expenses.
* Ina Walker, former CEO, and Hugh Clark, founder, of the New Media Technology Charter School, were sentenced to prison for stealing $522,000 in taxpayer funds, which were used to fund a restaurant and a private school.
* Dorothy June Brown, who founded a number of charter schools including Laboratory Charter and Planet Abacus, is to be retried this year for allegedly defrauding $6.5 million from the schools and then attempting to cover it up.
Source
Fed Draws on Academia, Goldman for Recent Appointees
Fed Draws on Academia, Goldman for Recent Appointees
When the Federal Reserve was established, Congress called for its policy makers to have “fair representation of the financial, agricultural, industrial, and commercial interests, and geographical...
When the Federal Reserve was established, Congress called for its policy makers to have “fair representation of the financial, agricultural, industrial, and commercial interests, and geographical divisions of the country.”
But Fed officials have recently been drawn from just two backgrounds—academics, either at universities or Fed research departments, and alumni of the financial services firmGoldman Sachs & Co.
The announcement Tuesday that Neel Kashkari would become president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis marked the third Goldman Sachs alumnus in a row to be picked to become a Fed bank president. The other two—Dallas’s Robert Steven Kaplan andPhiladelphia’s Patrick Harker —took office earlier this year.
Mr. Kashkari is a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs and a former Treasury official who ran the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) during the financial crisis. He takes the helm of the Minneapolis Fed Jan. 1, 2016.
Of the 17 Fed officials in office next year—five members of the Board of Governors and 12 regional bank presidents—all but three will have professional backgrounds as academics or with Goldman Sachs. The exceptions will be Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhartand Fed governor Jerome Powell, who worked at other banking institutions, and Kansas City Fed President Esther George, who was primarily a bank supervisor.
“The obvious downside of this is there’s more of a groupthink within the Fed,” said George Selgin, the director of the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank, referring to the shift toward a narrow range of backgrounds at the central bank. “That can be very dangerous if the groupthink is based on ways of thinking about the economy that are not necessarily sound.”
Mr. Kaplan, a former Harvard Business School professor, had worked as a vice chairman of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., leading investment banking activities. Mr. Harker, the former president of the University of Delaware, served as a trustee of Goldman Sachs Trust and its Variable Insurance Trust.
New York Fed President William Dudley also spent most of his career at Goldman, ultimately serving as its chief economist.
Since the central bank’s founding a century ago, the background of Fed officials has undergone a dramatic shift.
In the early days after the Fed began in 1913, the people selected to run the nation’s central bank were primarily small bankers, reflecting that in the early days, the Fed’s key function was providing banking services to a highly fragmented banking industry. The notion of using Fed policies to steer the broader economy had not yet taken hold.
Through the Fed’s first 40 years, the backgrounds of officials grew increasingly diverse. In the late 1940s, for example, Fed officials included Chester Davis, a former agriculture commissioner and grain marketer; Laurence Whittemore, of the Boston and Maine Railroad and H. Gavin Leedy, a private practice attorney.
The central bank’s leadership also contained many functionaries who rose through the ranks as Fed administrators, such as Robert Gilbert, who in his 20s become one of the first 14 employees of the Dallas Fed. He worked as a loan and discount clerk and in the war loan department, before becoming manger of the Dallas Fed’s El Paso branch and eventually the Dallas Fed President.
Such quaint backgrounds were common among officials in the central bank’s early days but were beginning to dwindle by the 1960s. Today Fed officials who rose through the ranks are almost entirely Ph.D. economists who headed the regional banks’ research departments; the lone exception is Ms. George, who worked as a bank supervisor and Kansas City Fed administrator. Ms. George holds an M.B.A.
Gradually backgrounds in industry, law, and other aspects of government or administration fell out of favor.
“Keep in mind, for much of the Fed’s first half, the focus was really on financial stability,” said Sarah Binder, a George Washington University professor who is also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “There wasn’t a well-worked out body of knowledge about monetary policy.”
As it became apparent that Fed policy held vast sway over the economic fortunes of the country, presidents and regional Fed boards increasingly turned to Ph.D. economists to guide the central bank and to be effective participants during the debates of the policy-making Federal Open Market Committee.
Ms. Binder thinks the narrow range of backgrounds among Fed officials may lead to a central bank that is thin on expertise when it comes to “the responsibilities that are laid on top of the board, in particular, that extend beyond monetary policy.”
The central bank is tasked, for example, with regulating much of the financial system, not only the giant Wall Street banks, but also community banks, insurers and other financial institutions. The Fed retains some responsibilities for consumer protection and community development, is responsible for the nation’s payment systems and continues to operate the discount window and other low-profile back-office banking functions.
Liberal activist groups, led by the Center for Popular Democracy, have pushed for diversity in the appointment of new Fed officials, pressing for representatives of workers and consumers or labor and community leaders. They have had no luck, and with the filling of the Minneapolis Fed presidency and inaction in Congress over two current nominees to the Fed board, there are no looming vacancies for the central bank’s composition to begin a shift.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Schumer and Pelosi on Opposite Sides of Budget Deal, As the Fate of DREAMers Hangs in the Balance
Schumer and Pelosi on Opposite Sides of Budget Deal, As the Fate of DREAMers Hangs in the Balance
After failing to force a government shutdown before Christmas, advocates from a variety of groups, including United We Dream, The Center for Popular Democracy, and Make The Road, managed to...
After failing to force a government shutdown before Christmas, advocates from a variety of groups, including United We Dream, The Center for Popular Democracy, and Make The Road, managed to convince Senate Democrats to do so in January.
Read the full article here.
Latino Construction Workers Continue to Die on the Job Because of Unsafe Conditions
Fox News Latino - January 16, 2015 - A new analysis of federal safety data found that while overall jobs in the construction industry are getting safer, Latino workers are still getting injured at...
Fox News Latino - January 16, 2015 - A new analysis of federal safety data found that while overall jobs in the construction industry are getting safer, Latino workers are still getting injured at alarming rates.
According to the data, between 2010 and 2013, the number of deaths among Latinos in the construction industry rose from 181 to 231. The number of deaths also rose in the industry overall, from 774 to 796, but that increase is attributed entirely to Latinos. During the same period, deaths for non-Latino construction workers fell from 593 to 565.
Each day across the country, hundreds of day laborers and migrant workers wait in street corners waiting to get hired. They are sometimes picked up by contractors or subcontractors looking to cut corners by hiring cheap labor that won’t expect benefits – most undocumented workers live in the shadows and, in general, don’t qualify for any federal benefits.
"There’s a clear correlation between low-wage jobs and unsafe jobs," said Occupational Safety and Health Administration chief David Michaels, according to the Nation. "Workers in low wage jobs are at much greater risk of conditions that will make it impossible for them to live in a healthy way, to earn money for their family, to build middle class lives."
Another reason for the spike in deaths is a rise in safety violations on job sites run by smaller, non-union contractors and an unwillingness by some undocumented workers to report violations, according to a 2013 study by the New York State Trial Lawyers Association.
"Contractors aren’t taking simple steps to protect their workers," Connie Razza, from the Center for Popular Democracy, told the New York Daily News. "They are not providing the training and the safety equipment that are required by law."
Advocacy groups are working to combat any changes to New York’s scaffolding law, which organizations like the Center for Popular Democracy say gives incentive to keep workplaces safe. The law holds owners and contractors who did not follow safety rules fully liable for workplace injuries and deaths.
Contractors argue that it has driven up insurance costs to record levels.
Lawmakers, however, have historically blocked any of the proposed changes to the law.
"All we’re looking for is the ability to have the same right as anybody else would in the American jurisprudence system," said Louis J. Coletti, president and CEO of the Building Trades Employers' Association.
In an attempt to make their work environments safer, some day laborers have joined together to seek protection through collective action. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, some day laborers in New York City turned to one another about the dangerous conditions, and decided together how to deal with them.
The Bay Parkway Community Job Center in Brooklyn brought in safety experts for guidance; community groups and foundations rallied around the laborers, helping them buy their new trailer with several grants.
With the help of organizations such as the Worker’s Justice Project, laborers learned about wage and hour laws, the hazards of exposure to certain building materials and what kinds of actions or treatment by the people who hire them constitute abuse and violations.
"When something isn’t right, at that moment, you may not realize it or attach much significance to it," Rafael Tecpanecatl, a laborer who came from Mexico 11 years ago told Fox News Latino. "I’ve worked many jobs that I realized later were hazardous to my health. I’d get on ladders that were not steady, I’ve sanded walls and cut plywood and had debris go into my eyes and lungs."
Source
Chicago Group Pushing For $15 Minimum Wage
Huffington Post - May 28, 2014, by Joseph Erbentraut - A coalition of Chicago aldermen on Wednesday introduced an ordinance that would increase the minimum wage for many workers in the third-...
Huffington Post - May 28, 2014, by Joseph Erbentraut - A coalition of Chicago aldermen on Wednesday introduced an ordinance that would increase the minimum wage for many workers in the third-largest U.S. city to $15 an hour.
The ordinance calls for corporations with more than $50 million in annual sales to increase worker pay to at least $15 an hour with a year of the law's effective date. Smaller businesses would be allowed more than five years to raise pay. Twenty-one of the council's 50 members have signed on as cosponsors, Crain's Chicago Business reports.
The current minimum wage in Chicago is $8.25 an hour, a dollar more than the federal minimum wage.
Several aldermen joined low-wage workers at a press conference at City Hall on Wednesday, before the meeting where the ordinance was filed. Home care worker Darlene Pruitt, a 55-year-old mother of three and grandmother of 22, said she earns $10.65 an hour after five annual raises of a dime an hour working for the Help at Home agency. It's not enough, the West Side resident told The Huffington Post.
Pruitt said she has sometimes turned to a food pantry to make sure her family has enough to eat. "It's hard out there," Pruitt said. "The cost to live in Chicago and meet your basic needs -- rent, utilities, food, medication, clothes -- is high."
Pruitt said she is not afraid of retribution from her employer from speaking out because she is optimistic her efforts will help other workers like her who are in a similar position. If she earned more money, much of it would go right back into her community, she said.
The Center for Popular Democracy, in partnership with Raise Chicago, an advocacy group pushing for the higher wage, released a study Wednesday claiming the higher wage would decrease worker turnover and stimulate the local economy.
The study said the higher minimum wage would be responsible for $616 million in new economic activity and would help create 5,350 new jobs in its first phase. The higher wage also would add $45 million in sales tax revenues, but would raise consumer prices about 2 percent, according to the study.
Voters overwhelmingly backed the $15 minimum wage in a non-binding ballot question on about 5 percent of the city's ballots in the March primary election.
Business groups, however, have yet to be swayed.
Doug Whitley of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce told DNAinfo Chicago the proposed ordinance is "a ridiculously excessive reach on the part of a local government to try to instruct private-sector employers how to manage their businesses." The chamber said in a previous statement with other business groups that employers "cannot afford another minimum-wage increase" of any amount.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel has announced his support of a higher minimum wage, but for less than $15 an hour. Emanuel last week trumpeted the creation of a minimum wage "working group" tasked with creating a plan for increasing worker wages in the city and previously said he backed President Barack Obama's push for a $10.10 federal minimum wage.
Source
Some Question City’s Decision to Keep IDNYC Documents
Advocates who opposed a policy of keeping documents submitted by IDNYC applicants believe the doubts they raised in 2014 have been validated by the legal fight over destroying those papers before...
Advocates who opposed a policy of keeping documents submitted by IDNYC applicants believe the doubts they raised in 2014 have been validated by the legal fight over destroying those papers before Donald Trump becomes president.
“Now they’re saying, ‘If they come for the data, we’re going to burn it,'” says Abraham Paulos, executive director of Families for Freedom. “Well, then why did you keep in in the first place?”
The policy of keeping documents was not part of the original version of the IDNYC law but was added during intense negotiations involving City Hall, the NYPD and advocacy groups.
Some of those advocacy groups—like Families for Freedom and the New York Civil Liberties Union—ended their support for the IDNYC program over the retention policies because they feared the information could be used by federal authorities hunting for undocumented immigrants. Other organizations expressed concerns but continue to support the bill and promoted the ID program.
The fears about the documents have grown more widespread since Trump, who has pledged to deport millions of people, won election. A lawsuit by two Staten Island lawmakers has at least temporarily halted the city from a planned purge of the documents in its possession.
Mayor de Blasio recently said that IDNYC, one of his signature achievements, would no longer retain copies of passports, utility bills and other documents submitted by people applying for the card, which is held by more than 860,000 New Yorkers.
For advocates, that move—while welcome—casts a harsh light on the decision to collect the documents in the first place. Still, many immigration advocates think the ID was a positive step.
Obstacles to an idea
New Haven, Conn., was the first city to issue a municipal ID in 2007, and some local advocates had been pushing for New York City to follow suit in order to give a widely usable ID card to the undocumented as well as others who lacked official identification. De Blasio embraced the ID as a candidate and called for it in his first State of the City speech.
From the outset, the idea faced an obstacle: How do you create a tool that will be especially useful for undocumented people without making it a scarlet letter? Attaching museum discounts and other benefits to the card aimed to broaden its appeal so that even citizens would obtain it.
But while that broader usage meant the card itself didn’t necessarily indicate a holder’s immigration status, the documents associated with each application still could. To obtain an IDNYC, a person has to present documents that establish identity and residency. Among the accepted proofs of identity are foreign passports, consular ID, foreign military identification—all of which could indicate a lack of legal presence in the U.S.
The question that triggered tension during the negotiations over IDNYC was whether that material needed to be saved once IDNYC staff reviewed the documents and approved the card.
The first version of the City Council measure that created the program included the language, “The city shall not retain originals or copies of records provided by an applicant to prove identity or residency for a New York City identity card.”
But the language that became law described a very different approach. It permitted the city to, once a quarter, destroying any application documents that had been held for two years. It also created an opportunity to destroy all the documents in the program’s possession “on or before December 31, 2016” and end document retention then—an effort to ensure that the papers could be shredded before an anti-immigrant president took office.
The lawsuit by Assemblymembers Ron Castorina and Nicole Malliotakis, both Staten Island Republicans, argues the state’s freedom of information laws should prevent that destruction of documents. Malliotakis made her opposition to the destruction clause known as early as February 2015.
Behind-the-scenes debate
When IDNYC was being shaped in 2014, “retention to us was something that we absolutely did not want,” Betsy Plum, director of special projects at the New York Immigration Coalition, recalls.
However, “It was critical that the NYPD accept the ID,” she says, because one goal for the ID was for it to be a resource when someone is stopped by police. “For us and the community we work with the NYPD was a really critical partner for us to keep at the table for the ultimate success of IDNYC.”
And the NYPD said it needed the documents to investigate fraud, she says. Plum describes a back and forth between advocates and City Hall over the retention issue. “They came back saying to us: ‘This is the only way it’s going to happen.'”
A mayoral spokesperson says the retention clause was inserted “after consideration from many stakeholders, including NYPD.” In addition to the language permitting destruction after two years or at the end of 2016, the final bill did require a court order or warrant for the documents to be handed over to any third party.
Some advocates believed those safeguards were enough to justify going ahead with the ID. “Once we were able to see a clear path for the data to be protected, we saw the benefits far outweigh the risks,” Plum says.
Another advocate involved in the discussions recalls that the coalition of advocacy groups involved in the negotiations took a vote on whether to maintain or drop support for the measure; a clear majority favored pressing ahead with the ID.
But Families for Freedom did not. Paulos (who was a City Limits intern eight years ago) already harbored concerns about whether the cards themselves could be used to identify undocumented people. “The retention and the data was the deal breaker,” he recalls. “Once we heard that the NYPD was also in the discussion, we pulled out.”
The New York Civil Liberties Union also parted ways with other advocates. “In this bill, the city has not done enough to protect those documents from being used by law enforcement,” NYCLU advocacy director Johanna Miller testified as the bill was about to be signed in July 2014. “While the NYC ID will bring benefits to many people, we are disappointed that the city is inviting New Yorkers to gamble with the stakes as high as prosecution or even deportation.”
A July 2015 report by the Center for Popular Democracy (which supported the New York law) noted that “the vast majority of municipal ID card programs around the country have prohibited the copying or retention of documents presented to prove identity or residency. In New Haven, San Francisco, and Mercer County, NJ, municipal ID card programs have run smoothly for years without copying or retaining personal documents of applicants.”
“The only city-run municipal ID card program that stores applicants’ personal documents is IDNYC,” the report continued.”
No regrets from supporters
In the months after the law’s passage but before it took effect, the commissioner of the city’s Human Resources Administration—which oversees the ID program—issued executive orders clarifying the protections for IDNYC data and the handling of requests for program information by law enforcement.
But concerns persisted. When the first oversight hearing about the law was held in mid-2015, The Fortune Society testified that it was concerned that, despite the safeguards in the bill, “federal, state and local law-enforcement agencies may not have to meet a probable cause standard to obtain documents.”
Fortune Society director JoAnne Page now tells City Limits: “The more vulnerable people are, the most risk that damage will be done,” if personal information falls into the wrong hands. “I don’t think there is a more vulnerable group than undocumented immigrants who have criminal records.”
Plum says despite the Trump election and the lawsuit, NYIC has no regrets about its decision to support the bill despite the retention policy. “If we were all to live in a reality where we only acted as it if the worst possible things could happen and we allows ourselves to educate and serve communities from a lens of total paranoia, I think we’d have a far worse outcome for the communities we serve and protect,” she says. “I think still with the ID the benefits have and still do outweigh the risks. The alternative here would be to have had no IDNYC – to have parent who can’t get into their kids schools, to have families unable to open bank accounts, to have survivors of domestic violence afraid to call the police because they have no way to identify themselves. I don’t think anyone would want to sacrifice any of those benefits.”
The Castorina-Malliotakis lawsuit is next in court on January 18. NYCLU staff attorney Jordan Wells says he believes the city will ultimately be able to follow through on their plans to destroy the documents. “The lawsuit pending in Staten Island is without merit,” he says. “Eventually the city will be able to follow the procedure.”
But Paulos believes damage has already been done. The fact that the city will now destroy the documents, and will no longer keep those generated for new applications, makes it hard to credit the assertions that keeping that paperwork was necessary in the first place. “There’s a lot of mistrust.”
By Jarrett Murphy
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