Campaign News

New York Times - January 17, 2014, by Michael Grynbaum and Katie Taylor - New York City’s top elected officials said on Friday that they would greatly expand the reach of a measure mandating paid time off for sick workers, a cherished cause of the national left that had long been resisted by local business leaders.

The plan, a stark show of force by the city’s new liberal establishment, is the first in a series of labor- and immigrant-friendly laws that Mayor Bill de Blasio is expected to champion, including higher pay for employees on many city-sponsored projects.

For the mayor, who has been in office for two and a half weeks, the sick-leave effort carried a potent symbolic weight, offering a chance to show early action on his campaign promise to close the gap between the city’s working class and its elite.

A bill unveiled on Friday would require businesses with five or more employees to provide up to five compensated days off to full-time workers if they, or their family members, fell ill. The benefits would accrue for 360,000 more New Yorkers, and affect 40,000 more employers, than under a weaker version that passed last year, which included only companies with staffs of 15 or more.

The revised measure, which also requires workers be paid on days spent caring for sick siblings, grandchildren and grandparents, would put New York closer in line to more stringent measures enacted in Portland, Ore.; Seattle; and Washington, D.C. It must be approved by the City Council, a likely outcome since Mr. de Blasio helped elect its new speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito.

In stagecraft and in substance, the announcement amounted to a direct jab from the city’s ascendant liberal leaders at the business-friendly, centrist politicians they have supplanted, who blocked action on a sick-leave measure for years, arguing its requirements would be financially onerous.

“Politics matter, and elections have consequences,” said Letitia James, the city’s new public advocate, in a pointed declaration that earned a broad smile from Mr. de Blasio and loud cheers on a mobbed sidewalk outside a Brooklyn restaurant, where officials introduced the measure.

The event, organized by the mayor’s office, was more like a raucous political rally than a formal news conference. Mr. de Blasio stood before a campaign-style banner featuring the slogan “One New York,” a play on his ubiquitous “tale of two cities” theme. Through loudspeakers, union officials and liberal activists chanted “Si, se puede!” as the mayor, at the lectern, conducted with a wave of his index finger.

“It may have taken awhile, brothers and sisters, but you never gave up the fight,” Mr. de Blasio said as he took the stage, acknowledging grass-roots advocates and council members gathered in the crowd.

“This City Hall is going to be on the side of working families all over this city,” the mayor said.

Liberal groups, led by the Working Families Party, had fought for years to enact sick-leave legislation in New York City, only to be stymied by Mr. de Blasio’s predecessor, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, and the previous Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, who said businesses were too overburdened to withstand the added requirements.

Mr. de Blasio has long supported sick-leave laws, but he became more outspoken as the issue came to the forefront in the mayoral race, when he started hammering Ms. Quinn, a chief rival for the Democratic nomination, over her refusal to allow a vote on the measure. Under pressure, she eventually allowed a compromise bill to pass the Council. At the time, the city’s leading business groups, who had a sympathetic ear with Mr. Bloomberg, virulently protested the passage of the bill.

Signaling New York’s political turn, those same groups on Friday issued only tepid statements, saying they hoped to work with legislators in shaping the final form of the measure.

In interviews, small-business owners offered mixed reviews when told of Mr. de Blasio’s plans.

Sunny Singh, the manager of Market Deli in Midtown Manhattan, said he employed six workers and was fearful that the requirements would be financially harmful.

“Small businesses, they cannot afford it,” said Mr. Singh, who was overseeing a busy lunch hour, adding that he did not have enough money to pay employees who were unable to come to work. “When they are sick, they don’t get paid. It’s usually like this.”

At a Manhattan branch of the nutrition retailer GNC, Sandra Cesar, the manager, said she believed her six employees deserved the benefits included in the measure. “Everybody is entitled to get sick and get paid for it,” she said.

But Ms. Cesar said she also worried that workers eager to avoid shifts could exploit the measure. “They might take advantage of it,” she said.

In other cities, including San Francisco, where sick-leave laws are already in effect, there have been few reports of businesses forced to close or lay off workers because of the requirement.

In Washington, which passed a law in 2008 requiring even the smallest businesses to provide three paid sick days a year, an audit last year found that the law had not discouraged new businesses from opening, although some local employers reported cutting back on workers’ hours.

Despite the celebratory atmosphere of the event on Friday, Mayor de Blasio and Speaker Mark-Viverito said they would hear out the concerns of business leaders who remain anxious about the measure.

“There is going to be a deliberative process,” the mayor said. “There is going to be an opportunity to hear the voices of small business.”

But Mr. de Blasio added that advocates had already spent several years debating the measure with business groups.

And Ms. James, who as public advocate presides over Council meetings, began her remarks on Friday by pantomiming a roll-call vote on the measure, joking that she would immediately move the bill, and declaring it passed when the council members gathered at the event shouted, “Aye.”

The expanded sick-leave bill would take full effect in April, unlike the measure passed last year, which was set up to be phased in over a period of 18 months beginning in April. And Mr. de Blasio’s plan would remove several provisions included to placate corporate leaders, including a clause that would eliminate the sick-day requirements if the local economy were to erode.

Nancy Alzokari, who works at Danice, a clothing store in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, said the new measure sounded like “a great step.”

A single mother, Ms. Alzokari said she was not compensated for sick days and often looked for a friend to take care of her three children if one of them was ill.

Even if someone becomes sick, she said, “the bills still got to be paid.”

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Today, a judge in San Antonio will be hearing opening arguments on a lawsuit against Senate Bill 4, a law passed in Texas last month that is the single biggest attack on immigrants this country has seen in decades. SB 4 commands police to search the papers of anyone who looks like an immigrant and levels hefty fines and even jail time for law enforcement officers who resist. Under SB 4, even campus police will have the power to do random searches, transforming college campuses, traditionally a site of sanctuary, into a source of terror.

Read the full article here.

The Huffington Post - July 15, 2013, by Brittny Saunders - Two weeks ago, the U.S. Senate approved historic federal immigration reform legislation in a 68-32 vote. Observers have linked the bill's relatively rapid movement -- perhaps unimaginable only a few years ago -- to the growing numbers of Latino and Asian voters and their overwhelming support for President Obama in the 2012 presidential election. The progress of federal immigration reform is just one signal that as the country undergoes sweeping demographic changes that will make the U.S. a majority people of color nation within 30 years, traditional understandings of what the machinery of public policy can produce and for whom will also shift.

Changes in the racial and ethnic makeup of the nation's population demand policies that account for the needs of communities of color as well as the increasingly central role such communities will play in driving economic growth in coming years. As experts have noted, the continuing viability of entitlements like Medicare and Social Security will soon depend on the Latino, Asian and Black workers who will constitute a growing portion of American workers.

These shifts are also altering constituencies and causing some elected leaders to revisit old positions. While much attention has been focused on the implications of these demographic changes for national elections and policymaking, this is not only a national trend. In state houses and city halls across the country, a historic moment has been taking shape. People of color, immigrants and workers are fighting for and winning state and local legislation that demonstrates the growing influence of the emerging new majority. In Connecticut, for example, communities fought for and won a statewide policy that makes it clear that local governments need only comply with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainer requests under limited circumstances, helping to restore trust between immigrant communities and law enforcement. The legislation, called the TRUST Act, was passed only weeks after Connecticut legislators voted to grant driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants, joining a growing list of states -- including Washington, New Mexico, Utah, Maryland, Illinois and Oregon -- that have already enacted similar measures.

The demographic shifts that are underway also create increased opportunities for immigrant communities to unite with others that have long been targeted by discriminatory state and local policies and practices. Growing efforts to challenge tactics like racial and ethnic profiling and disparate enforcement are evidence of this. These tactics have grave consequences for immigrant Americans, for whom an unjustified street or vehicle stop can lead to detention, deportation and permanent separation from loved ones. And even for those for whom immigration status is not an issue, such targeting can lead to costly, long-term engagement with the criminal justice system with implications for housing and employment opportunities. But across the country, in urban, suburban and rural settings, immigrant and African-American communities are working together to win policies designed to end police targeting of their communities.

In New York, such efforts led recently to a victory that promises to set a new standard for what state and local governments can do to tackle the problem of discriminatory policing. At the end of June the New York City Council passed two historic bills that will enhance NYPD accountability. The measures -- which passed with support from a supermajority of the Council -- will establish external oversight of the Department, expand protection against profiling to a broader cross-section of New Yorkers, and give City residents new tools for challenging discriminatory practices. The bills' passage is due to tireless advocacy by Communities United for Police Reform, a coalition including groups representing not only immigrants and communities of color in the City, but also LGBTQ New Yorkers, homeless New Yorkers and others. While the Council must still override a promised mayoral veto, its leadership in this area is significant. With this legislation, New York City has an opportunity to move to the forefront of state and local public safety policy, demonstrating that there are alternatives to the discriminatory, outdated and ineffective policing strategies that have been in place in far too many communities for far too long.

Of course, success is not inevitable. And these and other attempts to change policy at the state and local levels have faced organized and passionate opposition. But each of these efforts suggests a tantalizing possibility: that in the decades to come we may actually succeed in breaking with the entrenched patterns of old and building power among communities that for much of our nation's history have been marginalized.

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PHOENIX (AP) - A group advocating for worker’s rights is gathering signatures for a ballot initiative in Arizona that would increase the minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020, at the same time Republican lawmakers are proposing their own ballot measure that would give the Legislature sole authority to set the wage in the state.

The fight over Arizona’s minimum wage has grown amid widespread worker frustration over sluggish wage growth that has fueled presidential campaigns and led to legislative battles on both sides of the country - California and New York lawmakers are poised to pass bills lifting the minimum wage to $15 an hour over the next several years.

The Fair Wages and Healthy Families Initiative incrementally increases minimum wage in Arizona to $12 per hour by 2020 and requires employers to provide earned paid sick time.

The initiative campaign has less than four months to collect more than 150,000 valid signatures necessary to get on the November ballot. Arizona’s current minimum wage is set at $8.05 per hour and is increased annually based on inflation.

Campaign manager Tomas Robles said his group has worked with people on both sides of the issues to find a compromise that offers workers a livable wage without putting too much of a burden on employers.

“We feel that this wage increase is that happy medium that protects small business and helps workers who can’t pay their rent at the end of the month even though they work full time,” he said.

 The campaign committee has received backing from the Latino rights organization Living United for Change and the Center for Popular Democracy, a social and economic justice advocacy organization, Robles said. The campaign aims to collect more than 250,000 signatures using a combination of paid and volunteer petitioners to ensure they can get on the ballot.

At the same time, Arizona Republicans have proposed to increase the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2020 with annual adjustments based on inflation - in a bid to stymie an increase in wages they say small businesses could not handle.

“This offering is kind of a counter-balance to the insane socialism we hear in other quarters,” said Sen. Don Shooter, R-Yuma, during a committee hearing in March.

It would also prevent cities, towns and counties from setting their own minimum wage, which Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey has said would “drive our economy off a cliff.”

The Senate Appropriations Committee passed the measure on a 5-3 party-line vote. It will now undergo a standard review before going to a Senate vote. If passed, House Concurrent Resolution 2014 could go before voters this November.

If both measures end up on the ballot and both pass, the initiative with greatest number of “yes” votes would win.

By RYAN VAN VELZER

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