Campaign News

National education leaders are taking notice of the impact the Kentucky Family Resource and Youth Service Centers (FRYSC) are making across the commonwealth. 

An impressive list of these leaders visited Kentucky in late September to see first-hand the array of services the FRYSC Program provides by serving as the vital link between classrooms, families, and communities.

Officials from the National Education Association, Center for Popular Democracy, and the Communities in schools organization initiated the trip.

Participants represented a multi- disciplinary group of educational activists as well as teachers, principles and administrators from public school systems across the country.

Doug Jones, manager of FRYSC Region 7, helped organize the trip by choosing sites for tours in both rural and urban areas. 

Source: KFVS12.com

Campaign for America's Future - March 11, 2015, by Isaiah J. Poole - At the office of Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner, more than 2,500 demonstrators, most wearing white “We Rise” T-shirts, staged a protest against cuts in Medicaid and other social services. In Albany, N.Y., more than 2,000 people marched to the state capitol to protest education funding cuts. In Denver, dozens of activists came out in support of immigration rights measures, including driver’s licenses for undocumented workers.

These are just a few of the dozens of actions that took place in 16 states today as part of “We Rise: National Day of Action to Put People and Planet First.” Local and national progressive organizations mobilized around different aspects of a common agenda that stood in opposition to the right-wing and corporatist policies pushed through state legislatures in these states. The actions were all broadcast under the Twitter hashtag “#WeRise.”

“What we saw today was a stirring of the democratic spirit,” said Fred Azcarate, Executive Director of USAction. “People are upset at elected officials who spend more time working for big corporations and wealthy campaign donors than representing the people they were elected to serve. Today, people rose up to reclaim government and demand that legislators work for them and their families.”

The states where We Rise demonstrations were organized also include Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The events were led by groups affiliated with National People’s Action, Center for Popular Democracy, USAction, and other allies.

“Apparently conservatives believe they have a mandate to give big corporations another free ride on the backs of everyday people,” said George Goehl, Executive Director of National People’s Action. “But they’re wrong. They have no such mandate. Instead, as we can see in the resistance to draconian policy or Chuy Garcia’s campaign to unseat Rahm Emanuel as Mayor of Chicago, there is a new brand of populism taking root in America. People are fed up with politicians doing the bidding of big money. They’re ready for leaders who will work for, not against, people and the planet.”

“Politicians working primarily on behalf of big corporations are making it harder and harder for families to get by,” said Ana María Archila, Co-Executive Director of The Center for Popular Democracy. “Our families won’t stand for this, and today thousands of workers and families raised our voices in state houses across the country to demand that elected officials join us in leveling the playing field so that each and every family can thrive.”

The Campaign for America’s Future is working with two of the organizations behind today’s “We Rise” events, National People’s Action and USAction, in sponsoring the “Populism2015″ conference in April, with the Alliance for a Just Society. One goal of that conference is to build political momentum from today’s events around a populist progressive agenda “for people and the planet.” Register for the April 18-20 conference in Washington through the Populism2015 website.

Progress Illinois - October 29, 2014, by Ellyn Fortino - Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's proposal to lift the city's hourly minimum wage to $13 would leave out approximately 65,000 low-wage workers who are mostly women and people of color.

That's according to a new Center for Popular Democracy report, which compared the potential impacts of the mayor's $13 minimum wage plan with a competing $15 minimum wage ordinance introduced in late May by a group of aldermen, including members of the council's Progressive Reform Caucus. 

The proposed $13 ordinance specifically "shortchanges" domestic and tipped workers, the majority of whom are women of color, according to the report.

The Raise Chicago coalition, which supports the $15 plan, released the report's findings at a City Hall press conference Wednesday morning. More low-wage Chicago workers would be covered by the $15 plan, which would also almost double the economic impact for the city compared to the $13 measure, the report found.

"With the opportunity to nearly double the economic growth of people across the city, our Raise Chicago ordinance would help propel people towards financial stability, help this city and state with tax revenues, and its effects would ripple through every community in Chicago," said Action Now Executive Director Katelyn Johnson, a Raise Chicago leader. "The mayor's proposal does not do enough to address the needs of Chicagoans and, in fact, will keep people living paycheck to paycheck."

In July, Emanuel, along with 25 other aldermen, introduced an ordinance to bump the city's hourly minimum wage from the current $8.25 to $13 by 2018.

The measure models the recommendations of the mayor-appointed Minimum Wage Working Group, which was tasked with researching and gathering public comment about increasing the city's minimum wage. The mayor formed the commission the same month the ordinance seeking to hike Chicago's base wage to $15 an hour by 2018 was introduced.

Under the mayor-backed ordinance, the city's minimum wage for non-tipped employees would increase by $1.25 in each of the next three years and $1 in 2018 to hit the $13 level. The city's minimum wage would be adjusted each year after 2018 to keep pace with inflation. The tipped minimum wage, which is currently $4.95 at the state level, would be lifted by $1 to $5.95 over two years and indexed to inflation after that.

The $15 plan, on the other hand, would require large employers in Chicago making at least $50 million annually to raise their employees' wages to $12.50 an hour within 90 days. Those companies would then have to raise workers' hourly wages to the $15 level within one year of the measure taking effect.

Businesses with less than $50 million in annual revenue would have a different minimum wage phase-in period. Small and mid-sized businesses would have to increase their base hourly wage to $12 within 15 months. After that, the smaller employers would have to increase their minimum wage by $1 each year until they hit the $15 level by 2018.

Johnson said the mayoral working group's measure "burdens small businesses," because it provides "no separate phase-in period for large corporations and small businesses."

The city's minimum wage under the $15 proposal would be adjusted each year after 2018 to keep pace with inflation. If that plan were adopted, the base hourly wage for tipped workers would be 70 percent of the overall minimum wage.

Tipped workers under the $15 ordinance would earn a $10.50 hourly wage once the phase-in process is completed. That wage would be 63 percent greater than what the $13 plan proposes.

Domestic workers, meanwhile, are covered by the Raise Chicago minimum wage ordinance, but they're excluded from the $13 proposal.

"This exclusion would have a disparate impact on women of color, who make up the majority of domestic workers in Chicago," the report reads.

Ovadhwah "O.J." McGee, a Chicago home care aid and SEIU* Healthcare Illinois member, said workers who provide supports to seniors and those with disabilities, for example, deserve a living wage. McGee, a single father who is also a certified nursing assistant, said he earns less than $13 an hour and struggles to make ends meet. He said "$15 would make such a great difference for me."

"The mayor's proposal will leave domestic workers behind. They wouldn't even get the $13 an hour, and that's an injustice," McGee said, adding that the $13 ordinance also "shortchanges tipped workers, providing them with only a $1.50 wage increase."

"That's a shame," he stressed. "The reality is by leaving domestic and tipped workers behind, the mayor is leaving workers of color behind. The majority of these jobs are ... held by African Americans and Latino workers."

Nearly 40 percent of the city's more than 1.3 million workers living in Chicago make less than $15 an hour, according to the report, which also estimated the total number of workers who would see their wages lifted, either directly or indirectly, by the two proposals.

"Under the $15 proposal, we project that 444,000 workers earning up to $17.30 will receive wage increases related to raising the wage floor," the report states. "Under the $13 proposal, only those workers currently earning up to $15.60, or about 379,000 workers, would receive higher wages."

The $13 measure would leave out 65,000 low-wage workers, including 42,000 Chicago residents, according to the report. Of the 65,000 low-wage workers who would be excluded from the $13 plan, approximately 13,000 are African American and 20,000 are Latino.

Additionally, the mayor's $13 measure "fails to secure the truly robust economic recovery that the $15 Raise Chicago ordinance would achieve," the report reads.

After full implementation, the $15 proposal would generate $2.9 billion in new gross wages; $1.04 billion in new economic activity and 6,920 new jobs; more than $80 million in new sales tax revenues; and $125 million in new income tax revenues, the report found.

On the flip side, the $13 plan would lead to $1.25 billion in new gross wages; $522 million in new economic activity; and $40 million in new sales tax revenues.

"Our research found that the benefits of a $15 minimum wage far outweigh those of the mayor's proposed $13," Connie Razza, director of strategic research at the Center for Popular Democracy, said in a statement. "At a time when income inequality is at historic levels and American communities are still reeling from the financial crisis, two dollars more may well be the threshold between survival and stability."

"For Chicago, it means over half a billion more dollars in economic activity that would benefit small businesses and communities, millions more in tax revenue for the city, and would significantly raise the wage floor," she added.

During the March 18 primary election, Chicago voters overwhelmingly supported a non-binding ballot referendum to increase the city's minimum wage to $15 an hour for employees of companies with annual revenues over $50 million. The referendum appeared on the ballot in 103 city precincts, garnering support from about 87 percent of voters.

"The time to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour is now, and no half measurers will be accepted," Johnson stressed.

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Community organizer Wintana Melekin was grabbing a soda in late June at a coffee shop near her office when she heard Neel Kashkari, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, had just been in.

Seeing her chance, she dashed out the door after Kashkari, caught up and asked if he would meet with her organization, Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, to discuss racial and economic disparities in the Twin Cities.

He agreed, and to confirm that he meant it, retweeted Melekin’s tweet saying he was willing to meet.

On Wednesday, the meeting happened. Kashkari sat down with about a dozen people at NOC’s offices in north Minneapolis and committed to an ongoing collaboration between the Minneapolis Fed and some of the state’s most outspoken critics of a status quo in which blacks are not enjoying the benefits of economic growth.

“Some of the racial disparities are a crisis, and we need to treat them like a crisis,” Kashkari said. “One of the things I learned in 2008 is you don’t tackle a crisis with incremental solutions. You tackle a crisis with overwhelming force, and so if this is a crisis, and I think certainly parts of this are, then we need to bring overwhelming force.”

Kashkari, who became president of the Minneapolis Fed at the start of the year, is a former investment banker and Treasury official in the George W. Bush administration. He was appointed the first chief of the bank bailout program known as TARP at the end of the Bush term and start of President Obama’s administration.

Though his everyday work is at the very top of the national economy, Kashkari has a record of trying to understand its depths. As a candidate for governor in California two years ago, Kashkari spent a week living on the streets of Fresno, a midsize city, with just $40. He tried unsuccessfully to find work during that week and wound up in a homeless shelter.

It’s not clear how Kashkari and the nation’s central bank can directly address the challenges that were brought up at Wednesday’s meeting. The Fed controls interest rates, with the goal of creating maximum employment, but monetary policy can’t be targeted at segments of the population or certain states or cities. As Kashkari pointed out, black unemployment in the United States stubbornly tracks at roughly twice the level of white unemployment.

“There’s something structural in the U.S. economy, in good times and bad, that black unemployment is almost always twice as high as white unemployment,” Kashkari said.

He said driving unemployment downward will help everyone, and he is for low interest rates as long as they aren’t driving inflation upward. But he has not heard a satisfying answer for why the disparity in Minnesota is worse than in most places, though he committed to working with NOC to understand why it is.

From NOC’s perspective, the meeting with Kashkari was historic. Never before has a Fed president met face to face with its members in Minneapolis. As local ambassadors for the national Fed Up campaign, the organization has a fresh interest in the Fed and has taken the position that interest rates should remain low.

For Anthony Newby, the head of the organization, the meeting was a good starting point. Kashkari’s comment that the economic plight of black Minnesotans is a crisis requiring a response of “overwhelming force” was particularly satisfying.

“It sets the tone for how the Fed could, in unusual and unorthodox ways, use its power and position to solve some of these equity problems,” Newby said.

Kashkari agreed to spend a day with Rosheeda Credit, a mother of five at the meeting who said she struggles to pay for rent and child care. “The crime rate is high here, and the rent is high here and we’re not getting paid enough to work here,” Credit said.

He heard from Tenice Hodges, a former teacher who moved back to Minneapolis two months ago to help her sister’s family. She is living out of her car until she can get a teaching job because she can’t afford the city’s high rents with her restaurant wages.

“We are struggling out here,” Hodges said. “Yes, I’m employed. I work every day. But can I go out and get an apartment right now? No. I don’t have $1,100 by myself, or $2,200 for a deposit.”

Kashkari committed to looking closely at the résumés of people of color that NOC submitted for various board appointments at the Minneapolis Fed. He also said he will work with NOC on research and meet with people from the organization again in the future. He also committed to attending a workshop put on by groups affiliated with NOC at the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium, an annual conference in Wyoming where central bankers from around the world gather.

Kashkari, who has drawn national attention by calling for a transformative solution to the problem of banks that are too big to fail, explained that his role as a regional Fed president is to understand the problems people face in his district. While the tools of monetary policy are limited, and much of the heavy lifting that causes social change much happen in Congress, he said it is important for him to meet with people as he did Wednesday to understand their concerns.

“I appreciate that you think it is business as usual,” Newby told Kashkari. “I don’t think it is business as usual.”

By ADAM BELZ

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