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RH Reality Check - November 19, 2014, by Emily Crockett - When Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. George Miller (D-CA) invited Walmart workers to brief Congress on Tuesday about the retail giant’s abusive practices, the conversation was about more than just Walmart.

“No one in this country should work full-time and still live in poverty,” Warren said.

“This is about the simple dignity of the people you have hired to work,” Miller said. “When you have a higher minimum wage, fair scheduling, and equal work for equal pay, the perception of the business goes up in the people’s mind, the customers go up and the revenues go up.”

Cantare Duvant, a Walmart customer service manager, said at the briefing that since Walmart is the nation’s largest retailer, it sets the standard for others in the industry. “So not only do we as Walmart workers deserve better, our economy also deserves better,” she said.

Duvant is a member of OUR Walmart (Organization United for Respect at Walmart), a union-backed group of Walmart workers who are, in Duvant’s words, “struggling to support our families on low pay and erratic scheduling” in what is now “Walmart’s low-wage economy.”

“Walmart specifically is worth discussing not only because of the 1.3 million workers it directly employs, but also because of the impact its employment practices have on the rest of our economy,” said Amy Traub, senior policy analyst at Demos. She said Walmart does this by “pushing down wages, limited workers hours, and squeezing its suppliers and its competitors.” 

A majority of Americans are paid by the hour, and about half of early-career adults have no say in their work schedules, said Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy. “This isn’t just a narrow section of people,” she said.

Sen. Warren, a progressive hero who was recently appointed to a position in the Senate Democratic leadership, said that the issue of low-wage work in America is “deeply personal” for her.

When her father lost his job after having a heart attack, Warren said, her working-class family couldn’t pay the bills, lost their car, and almost lost their home. Then one day, “My mother, who was 50 years old and had never worked outside the home, pulled on her best dress, put on her lipstick, put on her high heels, and walked to Sears to get a minimum-wage job.”

“But here’s the key: It was a minimum-wage job in an America where a minimum-wage job would support a family of three.”

That could never happen today, Warren said, when “a momma and a baby on a full-time minimum-wage job cannot keep themselves out of poverty.”

Warren used the briefing to promote three pieces of legislation aimed at helping low-wage workers, including but not limited to people working at Walmart.

Those bills would raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour, give workers more reliable and flexible schedules, and help women address unequal pay based on gender.

Equal pay came up because women make up about two-thirds of the low-wage work force, and many are family breadwinners. Warren said that women in about half of American jobs can be fired just for asking whether their pay is unequal to their male coworkers.

The Schedules That Work Act, Warren said, is about the “basic fairness” of workers being able to plan for a second job, child care, or schooling. It would require employers to give workers their schedules two weeks in advance, compensate them for showing up for work only to be sent home, and not retaliate against workers for requesting more flexible or predictable schedules.

All three bills have been blocked by Republicans, which Warren openly acknowledged.

“I know that change is not easy. We might not pass these bills right away,” she said. “But don’t kid yourself about the importance of these bills, and the assurance that we’re eventually going to get them through.”

The Schedules That Work Act in particular would help Fatmata Jabbie, a Walmart worker and refugee from Saudi Arabia whose story was read at the hearing.

“Although I am not full-time yet, I am virtually on call seven days a week to pick up extra hours,” she said in her written statement. Her reward for that trouble is usually only 30 to 36 hours of work and $150 to $200 in take-home pay.

“I am a mom with two beautiful children, so I am not the only one who relies on that salary to survive,” Jabbie said.

OUR Walmart is pushing for bigger reforms than the three bills Warren promoted though. Members of the group are calling for their aggressively non-unionized employer to pay a minimum living wage of $15 an hour, provide stable, full-time schedules, and stop retaliating against workers who speak out against the company’s practices.

Duvant, for instance, already makes the $10.10 per hour that the federal minimum wage bill would guarantee—but that doesn’t do her much good, she said, when Walmart will only schedule her for 16 hours of work per week.

And Evelin Cruz, who worked for Walmart for 11 years, said at the hearing that the company fired her a few weeks ago for her activism with OUR Walmart.

“We spoke out for change, and Walmart did what it does best, which is bully, retaliate, and fire me,” she said.

Cruz told RH Reality Check that even though she no longer works at Walmart and is looking for other work, she’ll keep up the fight with OUR Walmart.

“That’s what they count on, for people to be out of Walmart and no longer want to participate,” she said. “But this is an issue that is not only affecting people in Walmart. It’s a widespread problem of scheduling, lack of hours, and a minimum wage that you can’t survive on.”

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WNYC - November 20, 2013, by John Hockenberry - Fifty years ago, in a case called Gideon v. Wainwright, the Supreme Court mandated that those accused of a crime must be provided a lawyer, regardless of their ability to pay. With that decision the public defense system was born. 

While Gideon has changed the equation for many indigent defendants, the law doesn't apply to all cases—just those in criminal court. Immigrants facing detention or deportation have no right to a court-appointed attorney and are left to advocate for themselves. In New York, at least 60 percent of detained immigrants lack access to counsel during their immigration proceedings. 

But the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project is looking change that.

With funding from the New York City Council and Cardozo Law School in Manhattan, the Project—the first of its kind in the country—provides indigent immigrants representation in detention and deportation proceedings, regardless of whether they can pay. 

The Project is the result of a task force of attorneys, activists and experts, chaired by Judge Robert Katzman, chief judge of the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

According to the task force, immigrants facing deportation in New York courts that have the help of an attorney are 500 percent more likely to win their case than those who lack counsel. Judge Katzmann says he hopes the Immigrant Family Unity Project will allow more immigrants access to justice, while helping immigrant families to stay together.

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The Federal Reserve is usually understood as the bankers' bank. But what if it was the people's bank?

At the Fed's annual Jackson Hole conference last week, an assortment of community organizers, activists, labor organizations, and economists showed up to push America's most important financial institution towards putting the concerns of working and nonwhite Americans at the center of monetary policy. The group, called Fed Up, has met with Federal Reserve officials before, but Thursday's meeting was nonetheless unprecedented and striking — both for being on the record, and for the detailed, impassioned, occasionally heated, and remarkably pointed conversation that resulted.

Fed Up's complaints are several. The Fed is too worried about inflation, the activists say, and not worried enough about pushing the boundaries of maximum employment when it sets interest rates. They also argue the population of Fed officials is not diverse enough along racial, gender or class lines, and that the Fed itself could do with some institutional reform.

To a large extent, Fed officials agreed: "I'd be surprised if anyone in the Federal Reserve thinks we've done well on [diversity]," said New York Fed President William Dudley. "We're going to run this economy hot. Get unemployment down lower," added San Francisco Fed President John Williams. "So I don't think we disagree about that basic view."

And in Fed official's defense, some of this balancing is a judgment call. The Fed's inflation target is 2 percent, but since that is neither a ceiling nor a floor, officials must decide how far to overshoot that target and for how long in the name of spurring job growth. There is also generally a lag time between a change in interest rates and when it's felt in the economy. So Fed officials have to make educated guesses about when to drop rates to firm up a stumbling economy or raise them to get ahead of inflation.

Finally, Fed officials themselves can disagree over the full extent of their powers. That point was illustrated in Thursday's meeting when Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren and Fed Vice Chair Stanley Fischer disagreed over just what tools the Fed has to deal with asset bubbles. (Rosengren argued there were lots of tools while Fischer insisted there were few.)

The first complication here is that, even from a technical perspective, it's hard to see why the Fed is even contemplating another interest rate hike in December. Rod Adams, a neighborhood organizer from Minneapolis, noted in a particularly impassioned moment that there's essentially no indication that inflation is on the rise. Fed officials' own projections show inflation will just barely touch 2 percent through 2018. Josh Bivens, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute who joined Fed Up at Jackson Hole, argued that fully healing the damage from the Great Recession will require a prolonged period of overshooting the Fed's inflation target.

And in truth, none of the Fed officials at the meeting really debated any of these points. What did come up was the threat of asset bubbles and financial instability. "One of the ways that you get maximum employment is that you don't allow excesses to build up to the point that you actually have another recession, which hurts everybody in the room," Rosengren said.

This is where the unspoken moral problem of Fed policy really becomes inescapable. In very broad terms, the effects of lower interest rates and higher inflation tend to fall harder on the more fortunate members of society: retirees with savings portfolios, people with financial assets, those who work in the financial industry, and so on. Meanwhile, the effects of raising interest rates and slowing down jobs and wage growth tend to fall hardest on the least fortunate: Racial minorities, people with only a high school education, or people with prior criminal records.

At any given moment, unemployment for African-Americans is roughly double the national unemployment rate. But that gap tends to close during boom times and widen during downturns. "The economy has recovered for much of white America, but for black and Latino workers it has not," said Adams. "If you decide that we're at maximum employment now and you intentionally slow down the economy, you'll be leaving us behind, pulling up the ladder right after you've climbed it."

The brutal truth is that when the Fed slows down the economy by raising rates, it is throwing people out of work. And the people most likely to be thrown out of work first are those forced to the fringes of the labor market already by discrimination and other circumstances. So raising interest rates to fight financial instability essentially means black, Latino, and other underprivileged workers are the first to be thrown on the sacrificial alter to save us all from Wall Street's irrational exuberance.

This is partly why Fed Up is pushing for more racial and gender diversity among Fed officials, and to remove the financial industry from its privileged position among those officials. The idea is that the voices of those people the Fed will help or harm should all be equally heard in its deliberations. Fed officials may agree on running the economy hot for a while, but the lack of those voices may be hiding just how hot we need to run it.

There are practical policy changes the Fed could make as well. Bivens has released work on alternative tools the Fed could develop to pop bubbles without causing all that collateral damage: Higher capital requirements for banks, more use of its research powers and public relations to alert the markets to bubbles, and other ideas that already lie in the scope of the Fed's powers. Rosengren said the Fed should use all tools at its disposal to fight financial instability. But if Fed officials are looking for practical ways to build Fed Up's concerns more fully into its ways of doing business, it could start by developing those tools and explicitly rejecting interest rate hikes as a way to combat bubbles.

Another would be to adopt a higher inflation rate target like 3 percent or even 4 percent. If the effects of maximum employment take longer to reach marginalized communities, then the 2 percent target is driving the Fed to cut off job growth before those communities can ever heal.

It should be noted, as Fed Up activists did, that within the scope of its tools, the Fed has actually done a far better job maximizing jobs for marginalized Americans than Congress or the state governments. To some extent, the Fed is catching heat because these it's actually willing to listen to reason.

But it's long been said that societies are judged by how they treat their weakest and most vulnerable citizens — that the powerless have a uniquely powerful claim on our responsibilities. And Thursday reminded us that truism applies to the Fed too.

By Jeff Spross

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“I want New Yorkers to know: we have a lot of tools at our disposal; we’re going to use them. And we’re not going to take anything lying down.” On the morning after Donald Trump was declared the victor in the U.S. presidential election, Mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, wasted no time in signaling his intention to use the city government as a bulwark against the policy agenda of the President-Elect. The move made one thing very clear; with the Republican Party holding the House and Senate, and at least one Supreme Court nomination in the pipeline, it will fall to America’s cities and local leaders to act as the institutional frontline of resistance against the Trump administration.

However, cities can be more than just a last line of defense against the worst excesses of an authoritarian central government; they have huge, positive potential as spaces from which to radicalize democracy and build alternatives to the neoliberal economic model. The urgent questions that progressive activists in the States are now asking themselves are, not just how to fight back against Trump, but also how to harness the momentum of Bernie Sanders’ primary run to fight for the change he promised. As we consider potential strategies going forward, a look at the global context suggests that local politics may be the best place to start.

The election of Trump has not occurred in a vacuum. Across the West, we are witnessing a wholesale breakdown of the existing political order; the neoliberal project is broken, the center-left is vanishing, and the old left is at a loss for what to do. In many countries, it is the far right that is most successful in harnessing people’s desire to regain a sense of control over their lives. Where progressives have tried to beat the right at its own game by competing on the battleground of the nation state, they have fared extremely poorly, as recent elections and referenda across Europe have shown. Even where a progressive force has managed to win national office, as happened in Greece in 2015, the limits of this strategy have become abundantly clear, with global markets and transnational institutions quickly bullying the Syriza government into compliance.

In Spain, however, things are different. In 2014, activists in the country were wrestling with a similar conundrum to their counterparts in the U.S. today: how to harness the power of new social and political movements to transform institutional politics. For pragmatic rather than ideological reasons, they decided to start by standing in local elections; the so-called “municipalist wager.” The bet paid off; while citizen platforms led by activists from social movements won mayoralties in the largest cities across the country in May of 2015, their national allies, Unidos Podemos, stalled in third place at the general elections in December later that same year.

In Spain, this network of “rebel cities” has been putting up some of the most effective resistance to the conservative central government. While the state is bailing out the banks, refusing to take in refugees and implementing deep cuts in public services, cities like Barcelona and Madrid are investing in the cooperative economy, declaring themselves “refuge cities” and remunicipalizing public services. U.S. cities have a huge potential to play a similar role over the coming years.

Rebel cities in the USA

In fact, radical municipalism has a proud history in the U.S. One hundred years ago, the “sewer socialists” took over the city government of Milwaukee, Wis., and ran it for almost 50 years. They built parks, cleaned up waterways and, in contrast to the tolerated level of corruption in neighboring Chicago, the sewer socialists instilled into the civic culture an enduring sense that government is supposed to work for all the people, not just the wealthy and well-connected.

More recently, too, cities have been proving their ability to lead the national agenda. In the last few years alone, over 200 cities have introduced protections against employment discrimination based on gender-identity and 38 cities and counties have introduced local minimum wages after local “Fight for 15” campaigns.

Now we need a dual municipalist strategy that includes both supporting and putting pressure on existing progressive city governments from the streets, and standing new candidates with new policy platforms in upcoming local elections so that we can change institutional politics from within.

Why cities?

There are a number of reasons why city governments are particularly well-placed to lead resistance to Trumpism. Most obviously, much of the popular opposition to Trump is physically located in cities. With their younger, more ethnically diverse demographics, urban voters swung heavily against Trump and, in fact, played a large role in handing Hillary Clinton the majority of the national popular vote. Not only did Clinton win 31 of the nation’s 35 largest cities, but she beat Trump by 59% to 35% in all cities with populations of over 50,000. In most of urban America, then, there are progressive majorities that can be harnessed to challenge Trump’s toxic discourse and policy agenda.

But alternative policies will not be enough to create an effective challenge to Trump; different ways of doing politics will also be needed, and local politics has great potential in this regard. As the level of government closest to the people, municipalities are uniquely able to generate new, citizen-led and participatory models of politics that return a sense of agency and belonging to people’s lives. This new process must have feminism at its heart; it must recognize that the personal and the political are intimately connected, something that is clearer at the local level than at any other.

It’s for this reason that the municipalist movement need not be limited to the largest cities. Though large cities will inevitably be strategic targets in any “bottom-up” strategy, given their economic and cultural power, all local politics has radical democratic potential. Indeed, some of the most innovative—and successful—examples of municipalism around the world are found in small towns and villages.

Bringing the political conversation back to the local level also has a particular advantage in the current context; the city provides a frame with which to challenge the rise of xenophobic nationalism. Cities are spaces in which we can talk about reclaiming popular sovereignty for a demos other than the nation, where we can reimagine identity and belonging based on participation in civic life rather than the passport we hold.

Why a network of rebel cities?

By working as a network, cities can turn what would have been isolated acts of resistance into a national movement with a multiplier effect. Networks like Local Progress, a network of progressive local elected officials, allow local leaders to exchange policy ideas, develop joint strategies, and speak with a united voice on the national stage.

On the issue of racial equity, an essential question given the racist nature of Trump’s campaign and policy platform, cities across the U.S. have already started to mobilize to combat Islamophobia, as part of the American Leaders Against Hate and Anti-Muslim Bigotry Campaign, a joint project of Local Progress and the Young Elected Officials Action Network. The campaign pushes for local policies to tackle hate crimes against Muslims, including the monitoring of religious bullying in schools, intercultural education programmes, and council resolutions condemning Islamophobia and declaring support for Muslim communities.

Climate change will be another contentious issue over the coming years. While much has been made of the policy implications of Trump’s claim that global warming was invented by the Chinese, it has been local administrations, rather than the federal government, that have led on the environmental agenda over recent years. Sixty two cities are already committed to meet or exceed the emissions targets announced by the federal government and many of the largest cities in the country, including New York, Chicago and Atlanta have set emissions reductions goals of 80 percent or higher by 2050. U.S. mayors must continue on this path, working with international networks of cities like ICLEI and UCLG to exchange good practices and to lobby for direct access to global climate funds in the absence of support from the federal government.

Even on issues that are under the jurisdiction of the federal government, like immigration, cities have some room for maneuver. For example, although Trump has pledged to deport all undocumented immigrants from the U.S., 37 “sanctuary cities” across the U.S. are already limiting their cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainer requests to reduce deportations. The mayors of New York and Los Angeles have already pledged to continue with this practice, and De Blasio has promised New Yorkers that the city will protect the confidentiality of users of the city ID-card scheme and continue to ensure that police officers and city employees won’t inquire about residents’ immigration status, predicting that Trump will face “a deep, deep rift with all of urban America” if he does not re-evaluate his stance on sanctuary cities.

What next?

First we must push our allies who are already in office at local level, including self-identified “Sanders Democrats,” to use all available means to act against any attempt by the federal government to roll back civil liberties, cut services or sow division among communities. Such cities must work, not only to counteract the worst excesses of the Trump administration, but also to continue to move forward on issues like gay rights and climate change, as well as forging new ground by standing up to corporate interests, increasing citizen participation in decision-making, and promoting the social and cooperative economies.

But we also need a new generation of local leaders, particularly women and people of color, who are prepared to take the leap from protest to electoral politics. The recent announcement by Black Lives Matter activist, Nekima Levy-Pounds, that she will be standing for election as mayor of Minneapolis is an inspiring example of the kind of candidate that is needed; someone with real-world experience and an insider’s understanding of social movement politics. But the search for new local leaders needs to be scaled up so that there is a pipeline of candidates to stand for school boards, zoning boards and local councils in 2017 and beyond. This is something that the Working Families Party is already doing successfully in many states, as well as supporting these candidates in primary campaigns against Establishment Democrats.

Finally, we must undertake new ways of doing politics at the local level to prove that there is an alternative to corporate lobbying, secret donors and career politics. There is no reason why candidates should wait until taking office to invite people to participate in decision-making. Local candidates should open up their policy platforms to public participation, integrating demands from social movements and local residents. There is also no reason why elected officials should use only the most generous interpretation of the law to guide their conduct; in Spain, the citizen platforms drew up their own codes of ethics for their elected representatives, including salary and term limits and strict transparency requirements. By leading by example, local movements can send a very powerful message: there is another way.

A resurgence of rebel cities in the U.S. would tap into a long-forgotten American tradition of radical municipalism and align with a new and growing international network of municipalist movements. Now is the time for us to seize this opportunity and to reclaim democracy from the bottom up.

BY KATE SHEA BAIRD AND STEVE HUGHES

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