Dem lawmakers hear demands for ‘reparations’; but let’s call it THIS so nobody gets ‘uncomfortable’
Leaders of the Black Lives Matter group received widespread applause from a crowd of Democratic state legislators, Friday, for suggesting the government award the...
Leaders of the Black Lives Matter group received widespread applause from a crowd of Democratic state legislators, Friday, for suggesting the government award the black community reparations for “systematic discrimination in law enforcement.”
“Thinking about decriminalization with reparations—the idea is we that have extracted literally millions of dollars from communities, we have destroyed families,” said Marbre Shahly-Butts, deputy director of racial justice at the Center for Popular Democracy, during her address at the State Innovation Exchange in Washington, D.C. “Mass incarceration has led to the destruction of communities across the country. We can track which communities, like we have that data.”
“And so if we’re going to be decriminalizing things like marijuana, all of the profit from that should go back to the folks we’ve extracted it from,” she continued.
The focus of state legislators should be “state budgets and then reparations,” Shahly-Butts said.
“‘Reparations’ makes people kind of uncomfortable, so we can call it ‘reinvestment’ if you want to. Use whatever language makes you happy inside,” she said.
Fellow panelist Dante Barry, executive director of the Million Hoodies Movement for Justice, also recommended some type of “reinvestment” to help black youth and said New York City would be better off investing $100 million in the black community rather than hiring more police.
“In terms of response around black youth unemployment, it gets back to this whole piece around reinvestment,” Barry said. “What would you do with $100 million? How would we better use that money to provide jobs for unemployed youth, to provide housing, to have mental health access. … It’s really about how do we rethink some of our budgetary needs and how we’re putting power behind the way that we can really incorporate reinvestment in communities.”
If there were one policy he would want state legislators to prioritize, Barry said it would be a ban on all guns on campus.
Source: Biz Pac Review
Five Key Questions to Ask Now About Charter Schools
Washington Post - January 23, 2015, by Valerie Strauss - You can tell that National School Choice Week is nearly upon us — it runs from Jan. 25- 31 — by the number of announcements coming forth...
Washington Post - January 23, 2015, by Valerie Strauss - You can tell that National School Choice Week is nearly upon us — it runs from Jan. 25- 31 — by the number of announcements coming forth hailing the greatness of school choice.
Jeb Bush’s Florida-based Foundation for Excellence in Education put out an announcement that it would participate in a march next week in Texas to support school choice (with one of the speakers being Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush, Jeb’s son). There’s a new poll by the pro-choice American Federation for Children showing (I bet you can guess) that most Americans support school choice. Etc., etc.
There is other school choice news too, but you won’t hear it from the pro-choice folks. This comes from 10th Period blog, by Steven Dyer, a lawyer who is the education policy fellow at Innovation Ohio and who once served as a state representative and was the chief legislative architect for Ohio’s Evidence Based Model of school funding:
In a disturbing new report from State Auditor David Yost, officials found that at one Ohio charter school, the state was paying the school to educate about 160 students, yet none, that’s right, zero, were actually at the school. And that’s just the worst of a really chilling report, which, if the results are extrapolated across the life of the Ohio charter school program, means taxpayers have paid more than $2 billion for kids to be educated in charter schools who weren’t even there. Here are the takeaways:
Seven of 30 schools had headcounts more than two standard deviations below the amount the school told the state it had.
Nine of 30 schools that had headcounts at least 10% below what the charter told the state it had, though it was less than two standard deviations.
The remaining 14 had headcounts that weren’t off by as much.
However, 27 of 30 schools had fewer students at the school than they were being paid to educate by the state
This means that more than 1/2 of all the charter schools chosen at random had significantly fewer students attending their schools than the state was paying them to educate, while 90% had at least some fewer amount.
So in honor of National School Choice Week, here are five questions that should be asked about charter schools, which today enroll about 2.57 million students in more than 6,000 charter schools nationwide.
The questions, and supporting material, come from the Center for Popular Democracy, which has exposed over $100 million public tax funds stolen in the charter school industry in a report titled, “Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud, and Abuse.”
Here are the center’s questions: 1. How much money has your state lost to charter waste, fraud and abuse?
With at least $100 million tax dollars lost to fraud, waste, or abuse by charter operators in the United States, there is significant progress needed before the charter sector can claim best practices on fraud and abuse. What’s worse, given the scant auditing and little regulation, the fraud uncovered so far might only be scratching the surface. The types of fraud fall into six major categories: [Reference: CPD report, May 2014] • Charter operators using public funds illegally for personal gain; • School revenue used to illegally support other charter operator businesses; • Mismanagement that puts children in actual or potential danger; • Charters illegally requesting public dollars for services not provided; • Charter operators illegally inflating enrollment to boost revenues; and, • Charter operators mismanaging public funds and schools.
2. Are charter operators required to establish strong business practices that guard against fraud, waste, mismanagement, and abuse? Do regulators in your state have the authority and resources to regularly assess charter school business practices?
Despite millions of dollars lost to shady practices, charter operators are overwhelmingly not required by law to establish strong business practices that protect against fraud and waste. We need change:
* Charter schools should institute an internal fraud risk management program, including an annual fraud risk assessment. * Oversight agencies should regularly audit charter schools and use methodologies that are specifically designed to assess the effectiveness of charter school business practices and uncover fraud.
3. Does your state require charter school operators and their boards of directors to provide adequate documentation to regulators ensuring funds are spent on student success?
Across the country, investigations led by attorneys general, state auditors and charter authorizers have found significant cases of waste, fraud and abuse in our nation’s charter schools. The majority of investigations are initiated by whistleblowers because most regulators do not have the resources to proactively search for fraud, waste, or abuse of public tax dollars. [References:CPD report, December 2014; CPD report, October 2014]
4. Can your state adequately monitor the way charters spend public dollars including who charter operators are subcontracting with for public services?
Because most charter schools laws do not adequately empower state regulators, regulators are often unable to monitor the legality of the operations of companies that provide educational services to charter schools. For example, Pete Grannis, New York State’s First Deputy Comptroller, reported recently that charter school audits by his office have found “practices that are questionable at best, illegal at worst” at some charter schools.[1] While his office would like to investigate all aspects of a charter operators business practices, they do not have the authority. To reform the system, he believes that “as a condition for agreeing to approve a new charter school or renew an existing one, charter regulators could require schools and their management companies to agree to provide any and all financial records related to the school.” [2]
This example typifies the lack of authority given to charter oversight bodies. Lawmakers should act to amend their charter school laws to give charter oversight bodies the powers to audit all levels of a charter schools operations, including their parent companies and the companies they contract out their educational services to.
5. Are online charter operators audited for quality of services provided to students and financial transparency?
Online charter schools represent another rapidly growing sector. The rapid growth has made the online charter school industry susceptible to similar pitfalls facing the poorly regulated charter industry as whole. As one longtime academic researcher puts it, “The current climate of elementary and secondary school reform that promotes uncritical acceptance of any and all virtual education innovations is not supported by educational research. A model that is built around churn is not sustainable; the unchecked growth of virtual schools is essentially an education tech bubble.”[3]
Given the poor outcomes being generated by most online charter schools, state regulators should be empowered with more authority to ensure these schools are not violating state laws or their charter agreements.
[1]https://www.propublica.org/article/ny-state-official-raises-alarm-on-charter-schools-and-gets-ignored [2] https://www.propublica.org/article/ny-state-official-raises-alarm-on-charter-schools-and-gets-ignored [3]http://nepc.colorado.edu/newsletter/2013/05/virtual-schools-annual-2013
Trump Picks Monetary Expert for No. 2 Job at Federal Reserve
Trump Picks Monetary Expert for No. 2 Job at Federal Reserve
President Trump continued a sweeping remake of the Federal Reserve’s leadership on Monday by nominating Richard Clarida, a Treasury official in the administration of President George W. Bush, for...
President Trump continued a sweeping remake of the Federal Reserve’s leadership on Monday by nominating Richard Clarida, a Treasury official in the administration of President George W. Bush, for the Fed’s second-ranking job.
Read the full article here.
Retailers Discover That Labor Isn't Just a Cost
For the past couple of decades, retailing in the U.S. has -- with some notable exceptions -- been a vast experiment in minimizing labor costs.
At the 2009 annual...
For the past couple of decades, retailing in the U.S. has -- with some notable exceptions -- been a vast experiment in minimizing labor costs.
At the 2009 annual convention of the National Retail Federation, though, Charles DeWitt noticed the beginnings of a shift. "Retailers started coming up to me and saying, 'We can't get any more out of this cost stone,'" recounted DeWitt, vice president of business development at workforce-management-software maker Kronos.
Since then, this change in attitude has become the stuff of business headlines. Most notably, Wal-Mart, the retailer that set the cost-cutting tone in the 1990s, has been raising wages and spending more on training. There's surely a cyclical element at work here -- as the unemployment rate drops, it's harder for retailers to find workers. There's also a political element -- bad press and minimum-wage campaigns must have some effect on corporate behavior.
But the really intriguing possibility is that retailers, in their technology-driven rush to optimize operations during the past two decades ("rocket science retailing," one Wharton School operations expert dubbed it) were actually failing to optimize labor. Their systems measured it only as a cost, and didn't track the impact of low wages, part-time work and unpredictable work schedules on sales and profits. Now some retailers are trying to fix that.
One big set of targets are the scheduling systems that have allowed retailers to ever-more-closely match staffing to customer traffic, but in the process wrought havoc with many workers' lives by making their schedules so unpredictable. Jodi Kantor gave a face to this last year with a compelling New York Times account of the chaotic life of a single-mom Starbucks barista.
Kronos supplies Starbucks' scheduling software, and DeWitt was quoted in the Times article describing its workings as "like magic." So it was a little surprising to see him on stage last week at O'Reilly Media's Next:Economy conference, nodding pleasantly and occasionally chiming in as a Starbucks barista, a labor activist and a journalist described the horrors inflicted by scheduling software.
When I told him afterward that I was surprised he wasn't more defensive, DeWitt said, "I'm more of a math guy, an optimization guy. This is a parameter to be optimized." It's also a business opportunity. "We are in early-stage investigations with very big customers," DeWitt went on. "The plan is to go in and suck all these things out of the database and work with them to customize metrics."
The idea is to figure out how dynamic scheduling and other labor practices affect metrics such as absenteeism, turnover and sales. Right now a lot of retailers just don't know. Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy and the labor activist who shared the stage with DeWitt, recalled a conversation she had with an executive at a big retailer at last year's National Retail Federation convention. "I said, 'These schedules cost you in terms of turnover.' She said, 'I’m in operations. That’s HR.'"
That's not true everywhere. Here's Stuart B. Burgdoerfer, chief financial officer of L Brands, the retailer that includes the Victoria's Secret and Bath & Body Works chains, speaking at the company'sannual investor day this month:
As we looked at the data, we just had too many people working too few hours per week. And the trouble with that or the opportunity with that is how well can they really know your business, how invested are they in us, or we in them, if they're only working a few hours per week and their turnover rate is very high?
And so we see the opportunity to have a more knowledgeable, more engaged, more effective and productive associate. When she's working, typically she is working more hours per week. So that's the opportunity. And we think it's a significant one. Really do.
Recent academic work backs this up, to a point. Researchers such as University of Chicago social psychologists Susan Lambert and Julia Henly and Pennsylvania State University labor economist Lonnie Golden have been documenting the extent and social costs of irregular scheduling. Meanwhile, operations experts at business schools have been trying to identify labor practices that maximize sales and profits.
The best known of these is probably the "good jobs strategy" outlined by Zeynep Ton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, first in a2012 Harvard Business Review article and then in a 2014 book. Ton studied low-cost, high-wage retailers such as Costco, Trader Joe's, Oklahoma-based convenience-store chain QuikTrip and Spanish supermarket chain Mercadona and concluded that they operated in a virtuous cycle in which highly trained, autonomous, full-time employees working with a limited selection of products drove high performance.
There's a tendency, upon hearing accounts such as Ton's (she also spoke at the Next:Economy conference), to wonder why every retailer doesn’t do that. One reason is that the limited-selection approach can't work for everybody. Another is that, as my Bloomberg View colleague Megan McArdle wrote last year, if every retailer paid like Costco, many of Costco's labor advantages would disappear. And finally, while some retailers surely have hurt themselves in their zeal to optimize labor, the move away from full-time retail jobs and toward staffing that's closely matched to customer demand hasn't been totally irrational.
In one recent study, Saravanan Kesavan, Bradley R. Staats and Wendell Gilland of the University of North Carolina looked at labor practices at a large (unidentified) retail chain. Their hypothesis was that the use of temporary and part-time workers would be linked with per-store sales in an inverted U-shaped curve -- with sales at first rising as the percentage of temps and part-timers rose, but eventually falling.
The data backed them up. To maximize sales, the optimal share of temp workers was 13 percent and part-timers 44 percent. But those percentages were both higher than the retailer's current averages of 7 percent and 32 percent. Overall, hiring more part-timers and more temps was likely to lead to higher sales.
The data-driven reexamination of labor practices by big retailers will surely lead to some improvements in how workers are treated and paid. I don't get the impression that, by itself, it will lead to all retail jobs becoming good jobs.
Source: Bloomberg
Carlos Menchaca: Sunset Park’s Councilman Brings A Voice To The Voiceless
Carlos Menchaca: Sunset Park’s Councilman Brings A Voice To The Voiceless
New York City Council Member Carlos Menchaca loves to grow spices and chilies to add to his home cooked meals — but when it comes to choosing his favorite Mexican food spot in Sunset Park, he...
New York City Council Member Carlos Menchaca loves to grow spices and chilies to add to his home cooked meals — but when it comes to choosing his favorite Mexican food spot in Sunset Park, he doesn’t play favorites.
“That’s a hard one,” Menchaca chuckled. “I always order tacos al pastor with a side of Mexican rice and beans,” he said of his traditional go-to dish. It binds him to his Mexican roots and the vibrant immigrant community that has adopted him as their hometown hero.
“What I love about Sunset Park is that anywhere you go, Bush Terminal Park, the senior center, down 5th Avenue, or even 8th Avenue, you feel at home,” Menchaca, who also represents Red Hook, parts of Bensonhurst and Borough Park, told the Sunset Park Voice. “It’s a neighborhood of families.”
A large majority of those Sunset Park families hail from the neighborhood’s Mexican and Asian immigrant communities — the two largest ethnic groups in New York City, after Dominicans, according to Census data — which stood firmly behind Menchaca during his 2013 run for District 38 council member.
Menchaca made history as the first Mexican-American Democrat elected to serve in the New York City Council. His victory over an incumbent councilwoman signified the rise of Mexican Americans in the political landscape, putting the young trailblazer on the map.
“We grew as a family. They took care of me and I took care of them,” Menchaca said of his constituents.
The 35-year-old Manchaca already knew he wanted to go into politics while growing up in the border town of El Paso, Texas, described himself as a “feisty kid, wanting to know everything” to advocate for his family.
He witnessed his single mother, Magdalena, struggle to raise seven children on her own.
“I don’t know how she did it,” Menchaca said of the hardships the family faced. “We interacted with government all the time, and it made me passionate about understanding how the system could be better.”
The first in his family to graduate from college, Menchaca holds a degree from the University of San Francisco in performing arts and social justice. His experience in political activism led him to New York to join the Coro Fellows Program – where he learned the value of community-government relations.
Since then, he’s made it his mission to bridge communities and as a council member he introduced participatory budgeting in Sunset Park – a democratic process that allows residents to decide how to spend a public budget and where taxpayers dollars go to fund their neighborhoods.
Menchaca’s success at empowering disenfranchised communities through the initiative has garnered write-ups in The New York Times, DNAInfo, and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. In his first year of PB, two-thirds of the ballots in his district were cast in Spanish and Chinese.
“Whether you live or work here, your voice matters, and what we’ve been able to do through participatory budgeting is bring opportunities to invite everyone to the table no matter their age, sexual orientation, or immigration status,” Menchaca said.
As Chair of the Committee on Immigration and member of the LGBT Caucus, Menchaca sponsored the 2015 launch of IDNYC, a municipal identification card offered to New Yorkers and undocumented immigrants. It gave them an opportunity to have legal identification without fears of deportation, open a bank account, access to public places, among other benefits.
But Menchaca was just getting started.
His next mission: Invest in adult education to help immigrant New Yorkers learn English. Menchaca says he receives daily letters at his legislative office from non-English speaking parents requesting for classes to help them communicate with their children’s teachers.
That’s why he’s advocating for $16 million and calling on Mayor Bill de Blasio to fund the Adult Literacy Initiative they way he did with universal pre-kindergarten. A recent report by the Center for Popular Democracy and Make the Road New York suggests that these classes could raise immigrants’ wages and reduce income inequality in impoverished communities.
“This is where it gets serious,” Menchaca said. “We think about gentrification and all the things that make us so afraid, because we don’t know what it is. But one thing that’s clear is how we can affect family’s lives through education.”
As our conversation steered towards immigration reform and the importance of ethnic and community media, Menchaca’s calm demeanor turned sympathetic. The 102-year-old El Diario/La Presna, the nation’s oldest Spanish language newspaper, laid off nearly half of its staff due to budget cuts, which shocked its readers, including Menchaca.
“The second I heard those real issues of El Diario, I called for a public hearing,” he said. He calls ethnic and community media a lifeline to many people in the city because it connects them to job postings, news, and immigration issues vital to families.
An hour before the hearing, Mayor Bill de Blasio and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito announced, via press release, an expansion of the administrations outreach to community and ethnic media companies across the city. In addition, the city created an online directory of 200 media ethnic media outlets, that will be available to city agencies and the city vowed to place more advertising in the ethnic papers.
Aside from the legal and education proposals, gentrification is another issue Menchaca’s community knows all too well. People have seen the factory district west of the Gowanus Expressway redeveloped as Industry City, a home for trendy shops, hip cafes, and markets like the Brooklyn Flea and Smorgasburg aimed at food fanatics.
In February, when the mayor proposed the BQX Connector, a streetcar line that would link Sunset Park to Astoria, Queens, some residents feared this new development would accelerate gentrification in their waterfront neighborhood, but the councilman says it can also ease transportation woes in his district.
“We are in desperate need of transportation options and I think the BQX serves as one idea we need to explore,” Menchaca said. “We want to increase the ability for people to travel outside the neighborhood for jobs.”
People have been vocal on fixing the R trains, the extension of bus lines, potentially bringing Citi bike and the ferry into their communities. For now, Menchaca sees the BXQ as an economic development to help community members, but it will only happen if people work together, he noted.
Menchaca confirmed that he plans to embark on a City Council re-election campaign in 2017.
What will his campaign be about? Preserving manufacturing jobs in Sunset Park, protecting immigrants through legal services, and shaping how the police force works with the community, he said.
“No matter the immigration status, you help everybody, and when you do that, you get these beautiful communities that are so diverse,” said Menchaca.
Clarification [June 2, 10am]: An earlier version of the headline misleadingly referred to the councilman as Sunset Park’s hometown hero, although he was not born in New York. We’ve adjusted the headline accordingly.
BY ELIZABETH ELIZALDE
Source
For Many Americans, the Great Recession Never Ended. Is the Fed About to Make It Worse?
When the Federal Reserve considers raising interest rates on July 28—and then again every six weeks after—MyAsia Reid, of Philadelphia, will be paying close attention. Despite holding a bachelor’s...
When the Federal Reserve considers raising interest rates on July 28—and then again every six weeks after—MyAsia Reid, of Philadelphia, will be paying close attention. Despite holding a bachelor’s degree in computer science, completing a series of related internships, and presenting original research across the country, Reid could not find a job in her field and, instead, pieces together a nine-hour-per-week tutoring job and a 20-hour-per-week cosmetology gig. The 25-year-old knows that an interest-rate hike will hurt her chances of finding the kinds of jobs for which she has trained, and earning the wage increase she so desperately needs.
A Fed decision to raise interest rates, expected sometime this year, amounts to a vote of confidence in the economy—a declaration that we have achieved the robust recovery we need. “We are close to where we want to be, and we now think that the economy cannot only tolerate but needs higher interest rates,” the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, told Congress during a July 15 policy briefing.
But for many millions of Americans, the recovery has yet to arrive, and for them, a rate hike will be disastrous. It will put the brakes on an economy still trudging toward stability; stall progress on unemployment, especially for African-Americans; and slow wage growth even more for the vast majority of American workers.
The general argument for raising interest rates is that it will prevent wage costs from pushing up inflation. However, there is no data suggesting price instability; nor is there any indication that wages have risen enough to spur such inflation. For the overwhelming majority of American workers, wages have stagnated or even dropped over the past 35 years, even as CEOs have seen their compensation grow 937 percent. During the same period, wage gaps between white workers and workers of color have increased, and black unemployment is at the level of white unemployment at the height of the Great Recession. Meanwhile, the labor-force participation rate is less than 63 percent, the lowest in nearly four decades, suggesting that many Americans have simply given up looking for work.
Yellen has herself often urged the Fed to look at the broadest possible employment picture. Yet, during her recent congressional testimony, shedownplayed the Fed’s ability to address racial disparities, saying that the central bank does not “have the tools to be able to address the structure of unemployment across groups” and that “there isn’t anything directly that the Federal Reserve can do” about it. She cited, rightly, a range of other factors, including disparate educational attainment and skill levels, that contribute to economic and social disparities between racial groups. But she also glossed over the importance of the economic environment in shaping workers’ unequal chances.
One defining metric in shaping workers’ chances is the unemployment rate. A high unemployment rate facilitates racial discrimination. When there are too many qualified job candidates for every job, employers can arbitrarily limit their labor pool based on unnecessary educational requirements, irrelevant credit or background checks, or straightforward bias. A tight labor market, by contrast, makes it much harder for employers to succumb to prejudices and overlook qualified workers simply because of bias. When the number of job seekers matches the number of job vacancies, African-Americans, Latinos, women, gays and lesbians, injured veterans, and formerly incarcerated workers finally get their due in the workforce.
The late 1990s, when unemployment was at about 4 percent, bear out this thesis. During that rosier era, black unemployment was 7.6 percent, and the ratio of black family income to white family income rose substantially.
As the guardian of monetary policy, the Federal Reserve has a number of tools for encouraging a tight labor market, and one of those tools is to keep interest rates low. By keeping rates low, the Fed creates a hospitable environment for job growth by lowering the borrowing costs for consumer and business spending—including hiring new workers. By contrast, raising rates deliberately suppresses spending by consumers and businesses. In the process, it slows job growth, holds down wages, and unnecessarily maintains racial disparities.
With so many workers still struggling, there is no need to cut off this recovery prematurely. Inflation remains below the Fed’s already-low 2 percent target, unemployment and underemployment are too high, and wage growth and labor-force participation are too low. In fact, the Fed should be doing everything within its power to keep nudging the recovery forward for the workers still caught in the slipstream of the Great Recession.
The Federal Reserve should not raise interest rates this week, nor when it meets again six weeks after that. It should not raise rates at all in 2015. Doing so would cause tremendous harm to the aspirations and lives of tens of millions of working families, and would disproportionately hurt African-Americans.
MyAsia Reid knows the difference that a full-employment economy can make. She is ready to participate in the economic recovery. And she will be watching as the Fed decides whether to hold to a strategy of strengthening the recovery or pursue a new strategy that jeopardizes her chances and her community.
Source: The Nation
Occupy the Minimum Wage: Will Young People Restore the Strength of Unions?
The Guardian - January 26, 2014, by Rose Hackman - Alicia White, 25, defied the odds of a poor background by attending college on a partial scholarship and going to graduate school. While she...
The Guardian - January 26, 2014, by Rose Hackman - Alicia White, 25, defied the odds of a poor background by attending college on a partial scholarship and going to graduate school. While she spends her days applying for jobs, the only work she has found so far is face-painting at children’s birthday parties.
“By going to college and graduate school, I thought I was insulating myself from being broke and sleeping on friends’ couches and being hungry again. The big, scary part is that I am going to end up where I was, but now I am going to be in that awful situation with $50,000 of debt,” White says.
White’s story is no exception. One in two college graduates are now either unemployed or underemployed. Millennials – even those from the middle class – are experiencing income inequality and America’s failed dream of upward mobility first-hand. The mismatch of college-educated young workers with low-wage, unskilled, precarious jobs is creating a new face of the once-dwindling American labor movement: young, diverse, led by millennials in their twenties and thirties, and fighting what they see as an unfair labor market. Their modest cause? Pushing for a higher minimum wage.
Because of too many young people interested looking for work, these millennials reason that the labor movement is the only way to address large-scale poverty and income inequality – starting with their own.
The "Fight for 15" movement is the most visible of these. Designed by the SEIU to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour, the effort has been driven by young activists. Last fall, the movement claimed its first legislative victory with residents in SeaTac, Seattle’s airport carrying suburb, voting to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour.
“There’s more enthusiasm than there has been probably in our lifetime for this,” says Ady Barkan, a 30-year-old Yale Law graduate and staff attorney at the Center for Popular Democracy in New York, indicating that the "Fight for 15" movement is picking up where Occupy Wall Street left off. He calls it “part of a similar cultural moment”.
It doesn't hurt the movement that the difference in pay between unionized and non-union jobs is pronounced. The median weekly earnings of union members in 2012 was $943, compared to $742 for those not in a union, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said in its recently released annual survey of labor.
“The dismal prospects for young workers are underscoring the fact that you can’t rebuild an economy on low-wage jobs and that inequality has reached a point where it really is an existential crisis for America,” says Annette Bernhardt, UC Berkeley's visiting sociology professor, whose work has focused on the low-wage economy and inequality.
Demographically, even the modest interest millennials have shown in the labor movement recently is a reversal of decades of disinterest. Unions have been ageing out of the economy along with their members, with nearly one in six union members aged 55-64, according to the BLS. Amid other trends – offshoring, automation, the growth of a service-centered economy – the share of national income that comes from labor unionshas been steadily falling since the 1970s. Union membership is at its lowest point in recent memory, with only 11.3% of Americans in unions. Critics, including the Center for American Progress blame those trends for the decline of the middle class.
Membership in unions is low for millennials – with only 11% of union members falling in the 25-34 age group, compared to 16% for workers between 55-64 – but their political views tend to align with the labor movement. A Pew poll this June showed 61% of Americans 18-24 in favor of unions, with strongest support coming from women and minority groups.
Diversity is more evident in the newer labor movement among millennials, reflecting the dominance of black and hispanic workers in unions nationally.
Jose Lopez, 27, is an organizer who works with Make the Road New York, mobilizing fast food and car wash workers. His previous work within the same organization involved pairing up young community members and artists with local businesses to paint storefronts, raising awareness about police brutality and stop-and-frisk. Lopez plans on bringing the same type of creativity to mobilize people around issues of inadequate income and wage theft, he said.
Protestor Janah Bailey, 21, of Chicago, currently works two fast food jobs: one full-time at Wendy’s, which she says pays $8.25 an hour, and one part-time at McDonald’s, which pays $8.40. On one day last year, Bailey walked out on both jobs for strikes against low pay. She says $15 an hour would change her life “tremendously”, expecting she would only have to work one job to make ends meet and help support her family, and spend her newly acquired spare time on studying to open up her own business.
The persistence of low wages is also mobilizing millennials who have never known a healthy job market. David Meni, 20, says he has held down a plethora of unpaid positions, internships and temporary jobs since his sophomore year of high school. His George Washington University chapter of the Roosevelt Institute’s Campus Network recently joined other local organizations in successfully pressuring the Washington DC city council to vote for an increase in the minimum wage to $11.50 an hour by 2016 from its current level of $8.50 an hour – despite the opposition of large corporations including Walmart.
That is not to say that young people will revolutionize the labor movement immediately. Millennials have an uphill battle in turning around the decline of labor. Studies show that while millennials support unions, until now, they have rarely joined them, perhaps in the belief that their low-paying jobs were temporary.
That perception may be changing as it becomes evident that lower wages are likely to be the norm for a long time.
Many economists predict that low wages are likely to continue into 2014, as pressure continues from corporate executives eager to return profits to their shareholders – namely by keeping a lid on expenses like pay. In a research report this week, influential economist Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sachs directly ties the 6.5% rise of corporate profits to the nearly inert 2% growth of US wages.
"The bottom line is that the favorable environment for corporate profits should persist for some time yet, and the case for an acceleration in the near term is strong," Hatzius wrote. "Eventually, the pendulum will swing back in the direction of lower profit margins and higher wages, but this still looks fairly distant."
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Fed Up with the Economy?
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Why the People’s Climate March matters to people of color like me
Ever since taking power, the Trump administration has made clear it intends to wage war on the environment. It’s given the green light to both the Dakota Access and Keystone pipelines and geared...
Ever since taking power, the Trump administration has made clear it intends to wage war on the environment. It’s given the green light to both the Dakota Access and Keystone pipelines and geared up to wipe away long-standing protections that keep our air and water safe. Its mission is clear: Eliminate any obstacle that stands in the way of fossil fuel companies.
Yet I refuse to see this moment as a crisis. I see it as an opportunity to bring together people from different backgrounds and different areas of the country to start building a truly national movement to defend our environment. And the People’s Climate March, happening on April 29 in Washington, D.C., is where it will take off.
This movement will be led by those most affected by climate change and pollution: communities of color and working-class families. These are the communities that have always been hardest hit by under-regulated oil pipelines running through their towns. The ones closest to coal train routes, whose residents suffer from lung cancer at alarming rates. The ones whose children bear the most exposure to lead. Many working-class Trump voters, in fact, may come to regret their votes when environmental problems worsen in their backyards.
That is why I believe caring for the environment is not a Democratic or Republican issue. I think it’s an issue all voters can and will come to rally around in coming years as Trump’s policies hit home.
The good news is that the climate movement is in a better place to take on this challenge than it’s ever been. And it is getting stronger every day, fueled by young people and people of color who are growing increasingly empowered to speak up for the safety and health of their communities.
The opposition to the Keystone Pipeline helped galvanize this movement into action. For years, pipelines had been approved around the country with only a passing glance at their effect on the local community, local wildlife, and local history. Keystone marked a turning point, showing that a unified, broad opposition could stymie plans for a pipeline.
Keystone planted the seeds, but Standing Rock is when the movement truly bloomed, bringing together thousands of people from every corner of the country to block a pipeline that threatens ancient water sources and blatantly disregards treaties with sovereign First Nations. By making a powerful argument that wove together environmental, racial, and economic justice, water protectors were able to attract both die-hard climate activists and allies brand-new to the cause.
This intersectionality will be the hallmark of the movement in coming years, and it will be our strength. That is why the People’s Climate March is so important. It’s not just about sending a message to Washington that we won’t stand for their agenda. It’s about sending a message of unity that crosses color lines and income scales. It’s about demonstrating the diversity of the climate movement, the diversity that gives us our strength.
But the work can’t and won’t end with a march. Already, community groups in states and cities across the country are banding together to fight the worst damage expected from the Trump administration. In Florida, Missouri, New York, and Virginia, they are looking for ways to elevate fights over local pipelines into the national debate. In cities like Seattle and New York, they are pushing their elected leaders toward divestment from the funders of the Dakota Access Pipeline. And nationally, they are mobilizing to prevent giveaways to oil, gas, and coal companies in any national infrastructure package.
Climate can no longer be a fringe issue. It must be an essential part of any resistance that fights racism and economic inequality, because the environment we live in affects those issues intimately. Air filled with smog raises the risk of lung disease, cutting life expectancy. Water filled with lead forces our children to grow up with learning defects that limit their ultimate earning potential. And workplaces filled with safety hazards make it more likely that workers — not employers — bear the cost of any accidents.
There is no plan B when it comes to our planet. It is a precious resource and it cannot be taken for granted. We must fight for it, today and for the years to come. The People’s Climate March is just one small step on this path.
By Aura Vasquez
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Movement for paid sick leave gains ground
The New Crossroads - May 13, 2013, By Gregory N. Heires - Grassroots campaigns for local and state laws requiring employers to provide their workers with paid sick days are gaining steam.
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The New Crossroads - May 13, 2013, By Gregory N. Heires - Grassroots campaigns for local and state laws requiring employers to provide their workers with paid sick days are gaining steam.
In the latest sign of the growing movement, the New York City Council approved legislation that would make 1 million workers eligible for paid sick days.
The passage of the bill capped a three-year fight for the legislation by unions and health-care advocates.
But the legislation faces a possible veto by billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has said he would not sign the bill into law. However, the City Council approved the legislation by a veto-proof margin.
On the day of the vote, Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, executive director of MomsRising.org, an online and on-the-ground grassroots organization of more than a million people who are working to achieve economic security for all families in the United States, said, “It’s been a long fight, but today the New York City Council heeded the call of New York families and passed a bill that would allow more than a million New Yorkers to earn paid time off to use when they are sick or to take care of a sick child, spouse or parent.”
Rowe-Finkbeiner called upon Bloomberg to “stand up to corporate lobbyists, listen to the people who elected him and sign this important bill.”
The new paid sick leave bill, which the Council passed by a 45-3 vote, would go into effect in April 2014. Initially, the law would require businesses with 20 or more workers to provide five paid sick days to its employees.
In October 2015, it would be expanded to cover firms with 15 or more workers. Furthermore, the law would protect workers who are not entitled to paid sick leave from being fired if they take time off.
“This is a sweet victory,” Bill Lipton, state director of the Working Families Party, told The New York Times. “It provides economic security for New Yorkers, and a shot in the arm for the paid sick days movement across the country.”
The Working Families Party and MomsRising.org were part of a coalition that included the New York City Central Labor Council, the Center for Popular Democracy, the New York City Council’s Progressive Caucus, 32 BJ SEIU, Make the Road New York, A Better Balance and NY Paid Sick Leave Coalition.
New York City joins an increasing number of municipalities and states that are supporting sick pay legislation. San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Milwaukee have adopted paid sick day laws. Pushes for similar legislation are underway in nearly 20 cities and states, including Denver, Miami, Seattle, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.
In March, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) introduced the Health Families Act. The legislation would allow workers to earn paid sick leave that they could use for personal illnesses, caring for a sick family member, preventive care or treatment for domestic violence.
In the United States, 40 million people work in jobs that don’t offer paid sick leave. One million workers in New York City, primarily low-wage workers, don’t have paid sick days.
In addition to arguing that workers have the right to paid sick leave, supporters of the New York City bill argued that the policy simply makes common sense. Faced with the prospect of losing pay, workers without the right to paid time off often decide to go to work when they have contagious illnesses. Furthermore, workers are less productive when they are ill.
“It’s an incredible feeling to know that I won’t ever again have to choose between my child’s health and my job,” said Juana Sanchez, who has three children and is a member of Make the Road New York, a Brooklyn-based community organization that represents Latino and other low-income workers.
“I believe this law enshrines the principle that American exceptionalism is not just about large profits and small elites, but a workplace that is safe, fair and respectful of the lives of workers,” said City Council member Gale Brewer, who first introduced the bill in 2009.
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