Activists confront Fed leaders to warn against rate hike
The liberal Center for Popular Democracy has launched a "Fed Up" campaign to urge the central bank’s chairwoman, Janet Yellen, and her team of policymakers against raising interest rates.
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The liberal Center for Popular Democracy has launched a "Fed Up" campaign to urge the central bank’s chairwoman, Janet Yellen, and her team of policymakers against raising interest rates.
Many Fed watchers anticipate Yellen and her team to increase the interest rate, lowered to zero percent following the 2008 economic crisis to spur economic growth as soon as September, citing steady growth.
But the campaign, whose board includes members of the AFL-CIO and Service Employees International Union (SEIU), says that the economy hasn't recovered enough to adopt such a policy.
"The economy remains far too weak to slow it down. We shouldn't mince words — when the Fed raises interest rates, it's doing that to slow the economy down," said Ady Barkan, Fed Up campaign director, on a conference call with reporters.
He called the prospect of the Fed raising interest rates "an insane perspective to take and an insane policy to take at the moment."
The group is sending about 50 activists to the annual Economic Policy Symposium, which includes members of the Federal Reserve, global bankers and top economists. The activists will hold "Teach Ins" that coincide with the annual summit.
Among the planned events is one titled, "Do Black Lives Matter to the Fed?" — a nod to the national movement to highlight policies that disproportionately hurt the African-American community.
Some progressives criticized Yellen’s testimony in the House last month, when she was asked what Fed officials could do to lower the African-American unemployment rate.
At 9.5 percent, the African-American unemployment rate remains significantly above the 5.3 percent national unemployment rate.
"There really isn’t anything directly that the Federal Reserve can do to affect the structure of unemployment across groups," Yellen answered at last month's hearing. "There’s nothing we can do about any particular group.”
Barkan said that Yellen "was wrong to say there's nothing the Fed can do to help African-Americans."
He argued that Fed officials could help African-Americans and minorities by adopting an agenda that focuses less on pricing bubbles in the markets and more on lowering unemployment, a tactic that would mean keeping interest rates low.
Activists associated with the Black Lives Matter movement have grabbed headlines in recent months for its aggressive questioning tactics to Democratic presidential candidates.
"We hope very much to engage with Federal Reserve officials into these conversations," Barkan said.
Source: The Hill
JPMorgan's Dimon defends Trump advisory role, deregulation
JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) Chief Executive Jamie Dimon on Tuesday responded to criticism from angry shareholders of his role advising President Donald Trump on economic matters, saying he...
JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) Chief Executive Jamie Dimon on Tuesday responded to criticism from angry shareholders of his role advising President Donald Trump on economic matters, saying he would help "any president" in office.
At the bank's annual meeting in Wilmington, Delaware, several attendees demanded answers from Dimon about his role on a White House business council and JPMorgan's involvement with financial deregulation efforts in Washington.
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Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to ICE by Canceling Their Contracts With the Agency
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Cities Are Saying ‘No’ to ICE by Canceling Their Contracts With the Agency
The stunning victory of 28-year-old Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the New York primary on June 26 pushed the call to “abolish ICE” suddenly and powerfully onto the national...
The stunning victory of 28-year-old Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the New York primary on June 26 pushed the call to “abolish ICE” suddenly and powerfully onto the national stage. (ICE, of course, is the acronym for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.) But even before big-name politicians like Kirsten Gillibrand and Bill de Blasio began taking up the call, a growing anti-ICE rebellion had begun reverberating across city and county legislatures in response to the Trump administration’s brutalizing “zero-tolerance” immigration policy.
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Jeb and Hillary’s opportunity on workweek fairness
Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton have been trading barbs about whether Americans are working hard enough, but behind the give-and-take is a real emerging issue that has a dire impact on our country’s...
Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton have been trading barbs about whether Americans are working hard enough, but behind the give-and-take is a real emerging issue that has a dire impact on our country’s 75 million hourly workers and their families: the 40 hour workweek is no longer something we can count on. The candidates have a chance to move beyond the gamesmanship and support concrete solutions at the national and local level to show their commitment to the stability of working families.
To summarize the exchange, Bush said that “people need to work longer hours.” Clinton quickly responded on Twitter, “Anyone who believes Americans aren't working hard enough hasn't met enough American workers.” Bush retorted, referencing the number of people who are involuntarily working part time and seeking full time work that, “Anyone who discounts 6.5 million people stuck in part-time work and seeking full-time jobs hasn’t listened to working Americans.”
Taken at their word, neither of them is wrong; both sides of the argument resonate in the lived experiences of the millions of people working by the hour. For hourly workers trying to work enough hours to earn enough to get by, it can mean taking the hours they can get –sometimes working short four-hour shifts, putting their lives on hold for a last-minute on-call shift, or working the late night shifts followed by too little sleep because of an early morning shift the next day – also known as a “clopen.”
This is reality for millions of Americans all across the country. Strained, exhausted, and without seeing their families some days. Their rent and bills are predictable, but the work hours they need to pay them are not.
Many of these workers both want more hours, like Bush says, and are working hard, like Clinton says. The American workforce is rapidly changing, and millions of people are caught in a cycle of too few hours, too little control of when their hours occur, and not getting paid for the time they make available to their employers. For part-timed hourly workers, there’s often no way to get ahead.
The issue missing from Jeb and Hillary’s exchange is how underemployment and unpredictability go hand in hand. The one thing these workers can count on is that their schedules will change each week, sometimes with just minutes’ notice. This last minute notice is typical of part-time hourly workers across the economy, especially in fast food and retail, by employers like Target, Starbucks, the Gap, Victoria’s Secret, and others. It’s impossible to pick up more hours at another job if you don’t know day to day what your schedule will be.
If Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton are looking for real solutions to these issues, a new movement being led by working moms has some concrete policy solutions to offer. Last week, Congress introduced the Schedules That Work Act, a path-breaking bill addressing these underlying problems of part-time work that Bush and Clinton are debating. The bill is a result of workers calling for schedules they can predict, more stable hours they can count on, and the right to have a say into the hours they work without retaliation. The Schedules That Work Act has garnered a wave of support, in both the House and Senate, and comes after a year when legislators in 12 states introduced policies to guarantee a fair workweek, including active municipal campaigns that includes Minneapolis, Albuquerque, and Washington DC.
Clinton launched her campaign and declared, “I believe you should receive your work schedule with enough notice to arrange childcare or take college courses to get ahead” and Bush’s recent statements on involuntary part-time work show that even the GOP can’t ignore the under-employed. But the chaos that under-employment and unpredictable scheduling sows into workers lives is not just fuel for rhetoric, it’s real. And it requires real policy solutions. Hillary and Jeb have the chance to go deeper than their back and forth, address the common underlying problems they’ve both identified, and stand in favor of federal and local legislation that builds a fair workweek.
Gleason is the director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy
Source: The Hill
Data on immigrants won't be safe from Trump, unless the data doesn't exist
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Data on immigrants won't be safe from Trump, unless the data doesn't exist
When New York City implemented its IDNYC municipal ID system, it was meant to give undocumented immigrants a way to access crucial services that require government identification. But as Donald...
When New York City implemented its IDNYC municipal ID system, it was meant to give undocumented immigrants a way to access crucial services that require government identification. But as Donald Trump’s inauguration looms, a new lawsuit will test the wisdom of keeping sensitive data for the program.
A NEW LAWSUIT WILL TEST THE WISDOM OF HOLDING THE DATA
Two Republican state assembly members have sued to stop the destruction of records on hundreds of thousands of cardholders, and a court has decided that the records must remain, pending a hearing later this month. Soon after, Trump will take office, as advocates worry whether he’ll target the information to identify undocumented immigrants.
There is no guarantee the lawsuit will succeed, or that Trump will be able to use the records — which contain information on many people besides immigrants — for deportation purposes. But what looked like a clever bureaucratic gambit is unexpectedly something very different, and to immigrants, possibly more dangerous.
When it designed the IDNYC program, New York retained information on cardholders, but with a caveat: at the end of this year, the city would have the power to change how it holds the data. In an act of partisan gamesmanship, the clause in the local law amounted to a kill switch — one that was put in place, as one Councilman almost presciently put it, “in case a Tea Party Republican comes into office.”
THE CLEVER GAMBIT SUDDENLY LOOKS VERY DIFFERENT
The suit filed this week rests on New York’s state transparency law, known as the Freedom of Information Law, or FOIL. According to the suit, since there are no provisions in the law that allow for the destruction of government records, the city would be overstepping its bounds by destroying the IDNYC data, especially based on who is in office.
The dispute isn’t without precedent. In New Haven, Connecticut, a similar legal battle unfolded over the city’s municipal ID program. There, an anti-immigration group also sued the city under the state’s freedom of information law, with plans to turn the information over to ICE. In that case, the city beat back the lawsuit, but that won’t ensure the same outcome in New York.
“The city is violating state law,” Nicole Malliotakis, one of the Assembly members involved in the suit, told The Verge. “They are not doing what’s in the best interest of the citizens that they are representing.”
In many ways, the database debate parallels other stories of unintended consequences unfolding as the government prepares to transition from Obama to Trump. How will Trump use the surveillance apparatus created by Obama? What does this mean for the undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children, who are staying through an Obama executive order?
THE DATABASE DEBATE PARALLELS STORIES UNFOLDING ACROSS GOVERNMENT
As the Center for Popular Democracy, which advocates for immigrants’ rights, pointed out in a report last year, there are two generally accepted ways to safeguard sensitive data: explicitly prevent its release in the legislation, or never provide the data in the first place. Cities have already proven that not retaining underlying personal information is viable — San Francisco operates a program without using underlying application documents, for one example.
Win or lose, if there’s any lesson for privacy advocates and local governments to carry from the unexpected battle over its data, it may be that even planned self-destruction is no impenetrable barrier against misuse. The best way to keep sensitive data private may still be to never hold the data at all.
By Colin Lecher
Source
Philly passes Fair Workweek law, raises minimum wage
According to figures provided by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Popular Democracy, 58 percent of Hispanic workers, and 55 percent of black workers “have no say” in their work schedules. In...
According to figures provided by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Popular Democracy, 58 percent of Hispanic workers, and 55 percent of black workers “have no say” in their work schedules. In addition, 41 percent of “early career adults” receive their schedules “one week or less in advance."
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The Spy Who Fired Me
Harpers Magazine - March 2015, by Esther Kaplan - Last March, Jim Cramer, the host of CNBC’s Mad Money, devoted part of his show to a company called Cornerstone OnDemand. Cornerstone, Cramer...
Harpers Magazine - March 2015, by Esther Kaplan - Last March, Jim Cramer, the host of CNBC’s Mad Money, devoted part of his show to a company called Cornerstone OnDemand. Cornerstone, Cramer shouted at the camera, is “a cloud-based-software-as-a-service play” in the “talent-management” field. Companies that use its platform can quickly assess an employee’s performance by analyzing his or her online interactions, including emails, instant messages, and Web use. “We’ve been managing people exactly the same way for the last hundred and fifty years,” Cornerstone’s CEO, Adam Miller, told Cramer. With the rise of the global workforce, the remote workforce, the smartphone and the tablet, it’s time to “manage people differently.” Clients include Virgin Media, Barclays, and Starwood Hotels.
Cornerstone, as Miller likes to tell investors, is positioning itself to be “on the vanguard of big data in the cloud” and a leader in the “gamification of performance management.” To be assessed by Cornerstone is to have your collaborative partnerships scored as assets and your brainstorms rewarded with electronic badges (genius idea!). It is to have scads of information swept up about what you do each day, whom you communicate with, and what you communicate about. Cornerstone converts that data into metrics to be factored in to your performance reviews and decisions about how much you’ll be paid.
Miller’s company is part of an $11 billion industry that also includes workforcemanagement systems such as Kronos and “enterprise social” platforms such as Microsoft’s Yammer, Salesforce’s Chatter, and, soon, Facebook at Work. Every aspect of an office worker’s life can now be measured, and an increasing number of corporations and institutions—from cosmetics companies to car-rental agencies—are using that informationto make hiring and firing decisions. Cramer, for one, is bullish on the idea: investing in companies like Cornerstone, he said, “can make you boatloads of money literally year after year!”
A survey from the American Management Association found that 66 percent of employers monitor the Internet use of their employees, 45 percent track employee keystrokes, and 43 percent monitor employee email. Only two states, Delaware and Connecticut, require companies to inform their employees that such monitoring is taking place. According to Marc Smith, a sociologist with the Social Media Research Foundation, “Anythingyou do with a piece of hardware that’s provided to you by the employer, every keystroke, is the property of the employer. Personal calls, private photos—if you put it on the company laptop, your company owns it. They may analyze any electronic record at any time for any purpose. It’s not your data.”
With the advent of wireless connectivity, along with a steep drop in the price of computer processors, electronic sensors, GPS devices, and radio-frequency identification tags, monitoring has become commonplace.Many retail workers now clock in with a thumb scan. Nurses wear badges that track how often they wash their hands. Warehouse workers carry devices that assign them their next task and give them a time by which they must complete it. Some may soon be outfitted with augmented-reality devices to more efficiently locate products.
In industry after industry, this data collection is part of an expensive, high-tech effort to squeeze every last drop of productivity from corporate workforces, an effort that pushes employees to their mental, emotional, and physical limits; claims control over their working and nonworking hours; and compensates them as little as possible, even at the risk of violating labor laws. In some cases, these new systems produce impressive results for the bottom line: after Unified Grocers, a large wholesaler, implemented an electronic tasking system for its warehouse workers, the firm was able to cut payroll expenses by 25 percent while increasing sales by 36 percent. A 2013 study of five chain restaurants found that electronic monitoring decreased employee theft and increased hourly sales. In other cases, however, the return on investment isn’t so clear. As one Cornerstonereport says of corporate social-networking tools.“ There is no generally accepted model for their implementation or standard set of metrics for measuring R.O.I.” Yet this has hardly slowed adoption.
Read the full article here.
Philly Council approves bills for ‘Fair Workweek’ and $15/hr wage hike
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Philly Council approves bills for ‘Fair Workweek’ and $15/hr wage hike
Philadelphia’s Fair Workweek bill is stronger in some ways than those across the country, but weaker in others, said Rachel Deutsch, an attorney with the Center for Popular Democracy, a main...
Philadelphia’s Fair Workweek bill is stronger in some ways than those across the country, but weaker in others, said Rachel Deutsch, an attorney with the Center for Popular Democracy, a main organizer of the national Fair Workweek movement.
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Why Charter Schools Are a Bad Idea: Guest Opinion
AL.com - March 17, 2014, by Rep. Craig Ford - Other than the $700 million hole in the state's General Fund budget, no issue has been more talked about than the charter school bill.
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AL.com - March 17, 2014, by Rep. Craig Ford - Other than the $700 million hole in the state's General Fund budget, no issue has been more talked about than the charter school bill.
Republicans in the Alabama legislature have made charter schools a part of their legislative agenda, and a priority in this legislative session (which is ironic, given these same Republican legislators campaigned on stopping President Obama's agenda, but President Obama has been one of the strongest advocates for charter schools).
The charter school bill was passed out of the state senate last week, and will most likely be voted on in the state House of Representatives this week.
Because the Republicans hold a Supermajority (nearly 70 percent of legislators in the House of Representatives), they will certainly force this bill through, and it will be up to Gov. Bentley to decide whether to veto the bill.
There is no doubt that something needs to be done in some of our school systems. But charter schools are not the answer, and will not give our children the better quality of education that proponents of charter schools have claimed.
Researchers at Stanford University conducted two studies on charter schools, in which they reviewed test scores from charter schools in 26 states. The results they found undermine the argument that charter schools outperform existing public schools.
In all, only 25 percent of charter schools performed better than traditional public schools in reading, while only 29 percent performed better in math. More troubling is that 19 percent of charters performed worse in reading, while 31 percent performed "significantly worse" in math. The rest performed at the same level as the existing public schools.
So after about two decades of experimenting with charter schools, the test results have proven that charter schools are not likely to give our children a better quality education. In fact, there's a pretty high chance that our children will get a lower quality education at a charter school than they would at the school they are already attending.
Charter schools also have a very real problem with fraud, waste and abuse of tax dollars.
The Center for Popular Democracy and Integrity In Education, both non-profit organizations, released a report that found more than $100 million in fraud, waste and abuse by fraudulent charter operators in just 15 of the 42 states that have charter schools.
Another report conducted by Integrity In Education found that, just in Pennsylvania, charter operators had fraudulently misused more than $30 million!
The authors of Alabama¹s charter school bill have claimed their bill addresses the accountability issues. But it does not.
The charter school bill that came out of the Alabama Senate does not require that ³Education Service Providers² be non-profit organizations. What this means is that, while the organization that applies for the charter might have to report to the state, the companies that it subcontracts to do not and have no accountability to the taxpayers.
The reason charter schools are hotbeds for fraud and waste is because the for-profit companies that provide education services, such as financial and operation management, managing the facilities and even designing the curriculum, are not held accountable.
In fact, in the reports I referenced earlier, government regulators were not the ones who have discovered the fraud in charter schools. The fraud was only discovered by an investigative reporter, or when a whistle blower came forward or someone filed a lawsuit.
The fraud has come in many forms, including charter operators using school funds illegally to buy personal luxuries for themselves and to support their other businesses.
Investigative reporters have also found that education service providers are typically non-compliant with request for information required by law under the Freedom of Information act. The Washington Post reported that, during their own investigation of charter schools, 70 percent of Education Management Organizations refused to respond to the request for a copy of their contract with Charter Operators, while another 10 percent claimed they were not legally required to publicly provide a copy of their contract.
So even if the Alabama legislature passes a provision requiring them to make their contracts and finances publicly available, 80 percent of these organizations have proven that they will ignore the law and refuse to provide the information.
The sad thing is these are not even all the arguments that can be made against charter schools. But these are more than enough to prove that charter schools are a scam, and a bad idea. Yes, something needs to be done in some school systems. But charter schools are not the answer.
Source
Yellen, Departing Fed, Will Join Brookings
Fed Up, a coalition of unions and community groups, said it would deliver a giant “Thank You” card to the Fed on Friday afternoon to celebrate Ms. Yellen’s success in reducing unemployment.
...Fed Up, a coalition of unions and community groups, said it would deliver a giant “Thank You” card to the Fed on Friday afternoon to celebrate Ms. Yellen’s success in reducing unemployment.
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