Campaign News

How Pension Plans are at Risk

Melisa Harris-Perry - March 23, 2014 - Lynnette Khalfani-Cox, Connie Razza, Arun Gupta and Karen Friedman takes a closer look at Detroit’s pension funds as the city struggles with bankruptcy and the growing retirement savings crisis nationwide.

  How CEO Pensions Compare to Average Workers' Pensions

Melissa Harris-Perry - March 23, 2014 - According to a recent survey, CEO pensions are worth at least 239 times more than the average employee's 401(k) at ten of the biggest U.S. companies.

 

Why Cities are Watching Detroit

Melissa Harris-Perry - March 23, 2014 - The MHP table discusses if other American cities could be on the same road as Detroit.

 

More than 120 members of Congress say the Federal Reserve has a striking diversity problem similar to the one that hit Hollywood's Academy Awards the past two years, and it's harming the economic prospects of millions of Americans.

The lawmakers -- including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), as well as Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) and John Conyers (D-Mich.) -- wrote to Fed Chairwoman Janet L. Yellen on Thursday complaining about what they called "the disproportionately white and male" leadership at the nation's central bank.

"Given the critical linkage between monetary policy and the experiences of hardworking Americans, the importance of ensuring that such positions are filled by persons that reflect and represent the interests of our diverse country, cannot be understated," said the letter, signed by 116 House members and 11 Senators.

"When the voices of women, African Americans, Latinos, and representatives of consumers and labor are excluded from key discussions, their interests are too often neglected," said the lawmakers, who were all Democrats except for Sanders, an independent running for the party's presidential nomination.

The diverse group of House and Senate members praised Yellen, the first woman to lead the Fed, for her "strong leadership" and efforts to help raise wages while combatting economic inequality.

But they said the Fed had failed to fulfill its statutory obligation to “represent the public, without discrimination on the basis of race, creed, color, sex, or national origin" and called on Yellen "to take steps to promptly begin to remedy this issue."

All five members of the Fed Board of Governors are white and three are men.

All 10 voting members this year of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the monetary policy-setting body that includes Fed governors and a rotating set of regional Fed bank presidents, also are white and six are men, the letter said.

In addition, 11 of the 12 regional Fed bank presidents are white and 10 are men, with no African Americans or Latinos.

When the voices of women, African Americans, Latinos, and representatives of consumers and labor are excluded from key discussions, their interests are too often neglected.

— Letter from lawmakers to Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet L. Yellen

Regional presidents are appointed by the directors of each Fed bank. The Fed's Board of Governors in Washington approves the appointments.

In addition, the lawmakers cited a recent study by the Center for Popular Democracy, a worker advocacy group, that said that 39% of all regional Fed bank directors came from financial institutions, while 11% were from community, labor or academic organizations.

Fed spokesman David Skidmore said the central bank was "committed to fostering diversity -- by race, ethnicity, gender, and professional background -- within its leadership ranks."

The Fed's board has "focused considerable attention in recent years" on recruiting regional bank directors "with diverse backgrounds and experiences," he said.

Minority representation on the boards of Fed banks and branches increased to 24% this year from 16% in 2010, he said. And the proportion of women directors increased to 30% of the total from 23% during that period.

In a blog post in January, the former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Narayana Kocherlakota, raised concerns about diversity on the committee that sets monetary policy.

“There is one key source of economic difference in American life that is likely under-emphasized in FOMC deliberations: race,” he said.

Kocherlakota reviewed committee transcripts from 2010, the most recent available, and said he found no references at meetings "to labor market conditions among African Americans,” even though their unemployment rate never dropped below 15.5% that year.

The lawmakers cited Kocherlakota's post, calling it "unacceptable that discussion of the job market for these populations would be an afterthought, or worse, ignored entirely, and we are concerned that the lack of balanced representation may be a significant cause of this oversight."

Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.), who signed the letter, pressed Yellen at a House hearing in February to consider "getting an African American, for the first time in history, to be a regional president of a Federal Reserve bank."

Yellen said she "absolutely" would and regretted there hadn't been such an appointment.

"It's our job to make sure that every search for those jobs assembles a broad and diverse group of candidates," Yellen said.

The lawmakers said they appreciated her concern about diversity but urged her to do more.

Connie Razza, author of the Center for Popular Democracy report, said the large number of lawmakers who signed the letter showed that support is growing for changes at the Fed to make sure "the economy works for all."

The center coordinates Fed Up, a coalition of labor, community and liberal activist groups that has organized protests outside FOMC meetings urging central bank policymakers not to raise a key interest rate until the job market is stronger.

By Jim Puzzanghera

Source

What do Credo Action, MoveOn, Idaho Medical Advocacy, CPD Action, Daily Kos, People’s Action, Elizabeth Warren, Mom’s Rising, Our Revolution, Change.Org, AARP, and the Economic Policy Institute have in common?

Well, possibly lots of things — each is an advocacy group working to change America.

Read the full article here.

The Village Voice - February 14, 2013 - When a worker in this city has to endure a three-hour walk to work because his minimum wage salary doesn't allow for him to afford public transportation, that's a problem.

Low-wage workers across the city have stood up in the past year to demand that such insecurity be eradicated and to pressure employers to finally begin to provide them with just compensation for their labor.

Building on the progress generated by these worker-led movements--in industries such as retail, fast-food, airline security and car washing--UnitedNY, the Center for Popular Democracy and other advocacy groups held a symposium and released a report yesterday analyzing the state of the city's low-wage worker movement.

"It's very difficult to try and make ends meet on $7.25 minimum wage in New York City," Alterique Hall, a worker in the fast-food industry, said during a news conference following the event. "Some nights you want to lay down cry because you [feel] like 'what's the point of going to work and putting all of myself into a job, [if] I'm going to be miserable when I get off work, miserable when I go home...and don't want to wake up and go to work the next day...to get disrespected, treated poorly and paid poorly.'"

Hall, who's been active in the push for fairer wages in the fast-food industry, is the worker who is often forced to embark on the three-hour treks to work. Hall said that his boss will sometimes said him home as a penalty for his tardiness--without considering the ridiculous journey he has to travel just to get to there.

"Working hard, and working as hard as you can, isn't paying off for them," mayoral hopeful and former City Comptroller Bill Thompson, said during the news conference. "They're being underemployed, They're being underpaid. They're being taken advantage of. They're being ignored. They're becoming a permanent underclass in the city of New York."

The UnitedNY and CPD report lays out four specific initiatives that workers and advocates must pressure the city to implement in order to help better the plight of low-wage workers. The reports calls on the city and employers to :

[Raise] standards for low-wage workers. [Regulate] high-violation industries where labor abuses are rampant. [Establish] a Mayor's Office of Labor Standards to ensure that employment laws are enforced. [Urge] the State to allow NYC to set a minimum wage higher than the State minimum--due to the higher cost of living in the City.

The report pays close attention to the need for City Council to pass the paid sick-leave bill, and increase the minimum wage in the city to $10/hour--a salary that would net a worker with regular hours about $20,000/year in earnings.

"We can't continue to be a Tale of Two Cities, where the path to the middle class keeps fading for thousands of New Yorkers," said New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio. "We must break the logjam and pass paid sick leave in the City Council. We have to protect low-wage workers fighting union busting employers. We can't tolerate inaction any longer. It's time for real action to fight for working families."

During one of the symposium workshops, a panel of labor experts discussed the obstacles facing low-wage workers in their fight to obtain such rights.

"[We've] shifted from a General Motors economy to a Wal-Mart economy," Dorian Warren, a professor of public affairs at Columbia University, said during the discussion. "[The job market is filled with] part-time jobs, low wages, no benefits, no social contract, no ability to move up in the job the way 20th century workers were able to."

Warren says that the quality of jobs in the American economy will only decline if something isn't done. He noted that 24 percent of jobs were low-wage in 2009. By 2020, that number is expected to nearly double and hit 40 percent. To make matters worse, technological "advances" are expected to increase unemployment rates by 3-5 percent moving forward.

"We're looking at an economy only of low-wage work in the future, but also of high and permanent levels of unemployment," Warren said.

The panel was moderated by acclaimed labor reporter, Steven Greenhouse of the N.Y. Times and included Angelo Falcon, president of the National Institute for Latino Policy, Deborah Axt, co-executive director of Make the Road New York, M. Patricia Smith, the solicitor of labor for U.S. Department of Labor and Ana Avendano of the AFL-CIO.

Several panelists stressed the need to combat attacks from right-minded forces seeking to erode worker wage and benefit rights. Falcon says that those fighting for worker rights must correct popular narratives, many of which categorize wage and benefit increases for workers as business-killers.

"When we talk about the minimum wage, the immediate response from business is, we're going to lose jobs because, we're only going to be able to hire a few people. We have to have an answer to that objection," Falcon said. "Through raising the minimum wage, you create job growth in terms of people being able to put more money into the economy. You're [putting] less pressure on social welfare systems...the system is still subsidizing business [when the public provides] welfare and other social services."

Warren* argued a similar point.

"I think we have to be much more explicit about targeting the right the way that they've targeted us. There's a reason why the right has gone after public sector unionism," Warren* said. "They know that's where the heart of the labor movement is in terms of funding and in terms of membership. We have to get smarter about which parts of the right do we target to destroy ideologically, organizationally so that we can advance further our movements. "

Source