Campaign News

 The marker between two territories is not just a line on a map. Norma Casimiro knows this all too well. Seventeen years ago, she left her home state of Morelos, Mexico, with a young son. Since then, she has lived in Westbury, New York, a suburban town in Nassau County with a population of just over 15,000. She lives in a studio in a sublet single-family home with her husband, who is also undocumented, and their eight-year-old daughter who was born in the United States.

Now, in the aftermath of the presidential election, Casimiro is anxious. Westbury is 11 miles from Queens, which means 11 miles from the protections that a so-called "sanctuary city" offers undocumented immigrants.

"We’ve never really considered moving to the city because we have jobs here and we feel as if we’re a part of the community," Casimiro said. "But it does sometimes cross our minds because of what could happen after January 20."

She knows that New York City would provide better public services for her and her family. "You can feel safer over there," she said, "especially after I heard Mayor (Bill) De Blasio say he would defend all New Yorkers, regardless of their immigration situation."

Living in the middle-class suburbs comes with a number of everyday difficulties, like limited transportation, scant social programs and high cost of living. Now, Casimiro feels even more vulnerable, anxious over the president-elect’s campaign threat to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. She also lives in fear that Trump’s anti-immigration policies may leave her son without the benefits of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), a type of administrative relief from deportation created during the Obama administration.

Since the election, she's perceived a change in the way people in the community look at her. "I have noticed some disapproving looks that left me with a bad taste," she said. "In Westbury, there are more Latinos than in other parts of the island and you feel safer. But I still feel afraid of going to some stores alone."

She and her family know that Westbury law enforcement has collaborated with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the past. That's why the family generally avoids any type of conflict and rarely goes out at night.

Once, Casimiro had an incident while cleaning a house in the area, which left her shaken.

“I was taking the trash out ... and the alarm went off in the neighbor’s home," she said. "The police cornered me and asked me lots of questions. They asked for my ID. I wish I had one of those IDs they give out in New York. I told them I didn’t have it on me because the owner had brought me in her car. Luckily, the babysitter, who speaks good English, came and intervened on my behalf."

In 2014, the Nassau Sheriff’s Department ceased cooperation with ICE and stopped holding immigrants in jail for longer than allowed by law. The Sheriff’s Department also adopted a set of recommendations, such as that agents not ask anyone about their immigration status.

The organization Make The Road New York explains the difference between living in a city or the suburbs. "The very structure of a city offers more protection because of the existence of public transportation, a more dense population and lots of diversity," organizer Natalia Aristizabal said. "The mere fact of being surrounded by neighbors in an apartment building makes people feel safer than living in an isolated house."

New York City offers access to social programs and diverse community centers. A policy, passed last year, states that municipal IDs can be used as official identification and to open bank accounts. There are also a number of reliable lawyers for low-income people at risk of being deported.

Legislation also exists in New York that prohibits the Department of Corrections from sharing information about any prisoner with ICE before sentencing. Nor can other law enforcement agencies provide the federal government with any information about the immigration status of New Yorkers.

These protections disappear outside the boundaries of the five boroughs. And Long Island’s geography does not help. Immigrants usually own a car because of the lack of public transport, but driving without a license creates risk. "The racial profiling techniques used in the past to intercept a Latino in a vehicle and automatically report their immigration status are well known," said Walter Barrientos, the lead organizer for Make the Road New York in Long Island. "In some places, measures have been taken to control these actions, but not so much in Nassau."

Scattered infrastructure and lack of diversity facilitate more discrimination. "This isn’t Manhattan," Barrientos said. "It’s really easy to see who does and who doesn’t have papers here. It’s those who drive old cars or are walking towards the train station."

Nassau’s Police Department reported 32 hate crimes in 2015. The department also reports an uptick in these types of attacks since the election. "Over the last few months, our people have clearly seen how there are people who are incorrigible when it comes to expressing who they do not want in their neighborhoods," Barrientos said.

In Nassau, legal advice for immigrants is almost non-existent. So it's difficult to explain, for instance, that pleading guilty to a traffic violation could affect an immigration process. "Any problem with the justice system opens a door to deportation. This is the biggest fear of our community: that Trump’s promise to deport all immigrants with a criminal history may come true."

Ana Maria Archila, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, said it is important now to find creative ways to defend people against a Trump administration that "seeks to fulfill their promise of harassing immigrants." This includes establishing a network of allies within the community who are "willing to turn their homes into 'sanctuaries' where people can stay and feel safe," she said.

In the meantime, Norma Casimiro waits. In nearly 20 years of living in the United States, she has never felt so insecure about her future and the future of her children. "All we can do is fight so that our voices are heard," she said. "And hope that someday we will enjoy the same protections as those in New York City."

By María F. Blanco  

Source

Starbucks employees say their schedules aren’t nearly as sweet as those pumpkin spice lattes they’re serving up this fall.

In a new report from the Center for Popular Democracy, a nonprofit that works with community groups, Starbucks workers said the coffee company has failed over the past year to make good on a promise to improve employees’ schedules. Instead, employees said they still face unpredictable workweeks, obstacles to taking sick leave, insufficient rest and staffing, and a failure to honor their availability.

“Starbucks’ frontline employees bear the brunt of the management imperative to minimize store labor costs, which takes precedence over attempts to stabilize work hours, provide healthy schedules, and to ensure employees have real input into their working conditions,” the report states.

The issues detailed in the report are familiar to anyone to many who work on “non-standard” schedules common among low wage jobs.

Starbucks first came under fire after a New York Times article from August 2014 described the struggle of a Starbucks barista and single mother, whose irregular work schedule caused turbulence in her personal relationships, other jobs and parental routine. The source of such chaos was supposedly Starbucks’s sophisticated scheduling software that cuts labor costs by arranging workers’ weeks based on sales patterns.

While this technology can boost a business’s profits, it can also leave workers working back-to-back shifts (also known as ‘clopening’), or not receiving enough hours to make ends meet. Sometimes, as the Timesarticle pointed out, employees would commute to work just to find their schedule changed.

After the public backlash, Starbucks promised to revise its policies and end the irregular scheduling practices for its roughly 130,000 baristas in the U.S.

To achieve this, Starbucks said it would post all work hours 10 days in advance, and give any baristas with more than an hour long commute the option to transfer to a more convenient location. Starbucks also said it would revise the scheduling technology and kill the clopening shift.

But much has remained unchanged, according to the 200 workers across 37 states the Center for Popular Democracy interviewed.

Nearly half of the surveyed Starbucks employees said they received their schedule one week or less in advance, and one in four workers said they still had to work clopening shifts.

Employees also reported feeling as though managers disregarded their availability, and denied them more hours when they needed additional work. Finally, 40 percent of employees said they faced barriers to taking sick leave when they were ill.

None of this seems to fit with Starbucks’s reputation as a “fabulous company” to work for, as jobs and recruiting website Glassdoor described it in its annual ranking of the 50 best places to work in 2014. Starbucks came in at No. 39.

The Center for Popular Democracy’s report did have some suggestions for improvement, however, recommending that Starbucks guarantee minimum hours and full-time work for those who want it. It also said the company should mandate that managers provide predictable schedules so working families can have a more stable work-life balance, in addition to taking the pressure off sick employees to find a replacement for a shift.

Source: Boston.com

PHOENIX -- The head of the state's restaurant industry is gearing up to convince voters to quash an initiative that would boost the state's minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020.

Steve Chucri, president of the Arizona Restaurant and Hospitality Association, said Wednesday the campaign against the measure will be based on showing them how much wages in Arizona have gone up since voters enacted the first minimum wage law in 2006.

Prior to that, Arizona employers had to pay only what was mandated in federal law, which was $5.15 an hour. The ballot measure pushed that to $6.75, with a requirement for annual adjustments based on inflation.

That has pushed the current state minimum to $8.05.

"The public will say, 'Enough's enough,'" Chucri said. And he said polls done for the industry in the spring show people believe that $12 is "too much."

The comments come as Arizonans for Fair Wages and Healthy Families is planning to submit its petitions for the $12 wage plus required paid leave today to the secretary of state's office.

Spokeswoman Suzanne Wilson said organizers have collected more than 250,000 signatures. That is 100,000 more than are needed to qualify for the ballot.

But Chucri said he's not convinced his organization will even have to fight the battle in November. He questioned whether petition circulators, both volunteer and paid, were careful to ensure that those who signed are qualified to vote in the state.

Arizona has become the latest battleground over what can be considered a living wage.

Several states have enacted their own laws, often through legislation. Most recently, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a measure that will take that state's minimum, now $10 an hour, up to $15 by 2022 for large employers; small companies will get another year to comply.

Chucri said part of the campaign against the ballot measure will be to remind voters here that Arizona already has a minimum wage that's higher than what federal law requires.

And that same law requires annual revision. Chucri pointed out that has meant a boost every year except for two when the rate of inflation was too small for even a nickel more, the bare minimum adjustment.

The difference, though, is not great: That $8.05 an hour is just 80 cents more than the federal minimum.

What Chucri also faces is that $8.05, assuming it's a family's sole source of income, translates out to $16,744 a year.

For a single person, the federal government considers anything below $11,880 a year to be living in poverty. That figure is $16,020 for a family of two and $20,160 for a family of three.

That's part of what has driven similar living wage efforts elsewhere in the country. But Chucri said the idea of a $12 minimum won't sell here.

"That is too high of a wage for a place like Arizona,'' he said.

Chucri said part of the campaign against the ballot measure will be the argument that higher wages mean fewer jobs.

"Restaurateurs are going to survive,'' he said. But what they will do, Chucri said, is simply hire fewer people.

He pointed out the push toward automation already is underway.

At Panera Bread, customers place their orders through computer screens and then can pick up what they want. And even at more traditional sit-down place like Applebee's, orders can be placed through tablets at each table.

Chucri conceded, though, that is happening even in places where the minimum wage is not going up. What approval of this measure would do, he said, is hasten the day.

"I don't think it's a matter of 'if,' '' Chucri said. "It's a matter of 'when.' ''

He would not say how much his group and other business organizations intend to spend to kill the measure.

The most recent campaign finance reports show campaign organizers have raised more than $342,000. Virtually all of that comes from Living United for Change in Arizona. But Tomas Robles, former executive director of LUCHA, said much of that is from a grant to the organization from The Center for Popular Democracy, an organization involved in efforts to establish a $15 minimum wage nationally.

Another $25,000 came from The Fairness Project which has its own efforts to push higher minimum wages on a state-by-state basis.

By Howard Fischer

Source

Central bankers and economists from around the world will gather in the mountain resort of Jackson Hole, Wyo., beginning Thursday for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City's annual economic symposium.

The theme of this year's conference, "Fostering a Dynamic Global Economy, " highlights the challenges of boosting economic growth during an expansion that has been marked by poor productivity gains, rising protectionism and demands for greater fiscal austerity.

Read the full article here.