Report: Black Minnesotans Missing Out On Economic Recovery
CBS Minnesota - March 5, 2015 - African Americans are not experiencing the same economic recovery compared to others in the country, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute...
CBS Minnesota - March 5, 2015 - African Americans are not experiencing the same economic recovery compared to others in the country, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute and the Center for Popular Democracy.
Some organizations say Minnesota is experiencing a crisis level of inequality with wages and jobs.
Black unemployment is four times higher than whites in the state.
“It’s a report that shows, I think, what we already knew,” Neighborhoods Organizing for Change’s Anthony Newby said.
He says he did not need a report to know the challenges faced by many in his community.
“If you look right outside the door here on Broadway Avenue, you’ll see a total lack of industry. We’ve got low-wage jobs, low-wage opportunities,” Newby said. “We’re a mile and a half or so from downtown Minneapolis, which is considered one of the economic hubs, certainly of the Midwest.”
The report spells out how the economy is bouncing back, but not for African Americans — especially those who live in Minnesota.
Since 2000, wages have decreased by 44 cents an hour for African Americans. This statistic does not ring true for whites or Latinos.
“We’re told that Minnesota is one of the best places in the country to live if you want a job, and that’s true if you’re a white person. Unemployment is 2.8 percent. If you’re black, its 10.9 percent,” Newby said.
Kentha Parker says she is more than a statistic.
“I’ve been looking for work since 2011, since the tornado,” Parker said.
She’s a mother who is struggling to find work to take care of her family. She says she’s tired of hearing these words: “We’re not hiring at this time, we’ll keep your application on file."
“The Federal Reserve, which has a branch right here in Minneapolis, could do a lot to actually influence the general economy,” Newby said.
He believes the Federal Reserve has the power to keep interest rates low, which in turn could boost wages and help reduce income inequality.
Newby says Neighborhoods Organizing for Change will push to be a part of the conversation.
He wants to see people of color at the table when the Federal Reserve produces its policies.
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Fed chairman defends interest rate hikes as Trump’s attacks show no sign of working
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Fed chairman defends interest rate hikes as Trump’s attacks show no sign of working
Several protesters from the progressive group Fed Up stood outside the conference room where Powell delivered the speech. Much like Trump, they say raising rates again will harm working people’s...
Several protesters from the progressive group Fed Up stood outside the conference room where Powell delivered the speech. Much like Trump, they say raising rates again will harm working people’s chances of getting jobs and better pay. The protesters wore green T-shirts reading “The Fed wants more of us unemployed.
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Fed Up Applauds Cautious Approach to Rate Hikes This Year
02/05/2016
Statement & Booking Opportunity: Ady Barkan, Director of the Fed Up campaign, released the following statement in...
02/05/2016
Statement & Booking Opportunity: Ady Barkan, Director of the Fed Up campaign, released the following statement in response to today’s Jobs Report:
“While January’s job data shows a moderately good start to the new year, fears that global turmoil will roil the U.S. economy are giving Fed officials pause about raising interest rates. Earlier this week, San Francisco Fed President John Williams and Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan both suggested that recent foreign stock market instability is influencing the trajectory of projected interest rate increases by the Fed this year. Kaplan explained that stock market turmoil coupled with low commodity prices gives the Fed good reasons to be patient and take more time to assess the impact on the U.S. economy. The Federal Reserve intentionally slowed down the economy in December, ignoring the voices of working people around the country. In January, we learned that the economy barely grew at all in late 2015. And as international markets tumbled, the Fed began to walk back its excessive optimism. It’s good that Fed officials are now taking a cautious approach to rate hikes. They need to keep their eyes on the fundamentals, and prioritize higher labor force participation, higher wages, and lower racial disparities in the labor market.”
# # #
www.whatrecovery.com
Fed Up is a coalition of community organizations and labor unions across the country, campaigning for the Federal Reserve to adopt pro-worker policies for the rest of us. The Fed can keep interest rates low, give the economy a fair chance to recover, and prioritize full employment and rising wages.
Media Contact: Anita Jain, ajain@populardemocracy.org, 347-636-9761
Sofie Tholl, stholl@populardemocracy.org, 646-509-5558
Tipped Workers Fight for Higher Wages
Amsterdam News - July 17, 2014, by Stephon Johnson - Last week, a new coalition of food delivery workers, low-wage tipped workers and women’s rights leaders across New York called for an end to...
Amsterdam News - July 17, 2014, by Stephon Johnson - Last week, a new coalition of food delivery workers, low-wage tipped workers and women’s rights leaders across New York called for an end to subminimum wages for tipped workers. This campaign begins right when Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration is preparing to appoint a Wage Board charged with recommending an increase in the minimum wage for tipped workers.
The broad coalition fighting for subminimum wage workers includes Make the Road New York, the Center for Popular Democracy, Fast Food Forward, the Labor-Religion Coalition, the National Employment Law Project, New York Communities for Change, the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York, Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, Strong for All, United New York and other community groups.
On July 10, Domino’s delivery workers rallied outside of a Manhattan Domino’s restaurant to call for an end to subminimum wages for tipped workers, citing wage theft, and demanding an administrative wage order that requires companies to directly pay tipped workers the state’s minimum wage, with tips as an addition.
“The public might think we do well, but the reality is that many times we don’t even get a tip,” said Alfredo Franco, a tipped Domino’s delivery worker in New York City. “Delivery fees are often confused with a tip for the drivers. We never see a penny of that. Many of us have to work two or three jobs just to get by, sacrificing everything, including time with our families. We need a reliable income. The tipped [sub]minimum wage has to go.”
According to a report released on July 9 by the National Employment Law Project, a wage order eliminating the tipped subminimum wage would benefit close to 229,000 low-wage tipped workers in New York. Women make up more than 70 percent of the low-wage work force. The wage order would benefit working women and, according to the report, make progress in addressing the gender pay gap in New York.
Michael Stewart, executive director of United NY, released a statement championing the NELP’s report. “As New York faces one of the worst economic inequality crises in the nation, it should put an end to the subminimum wage for tipped workers that leaves so many of our neighbors living in extreme poverty,” said Stewart. “The minimum wage is already too low. Allowing employers to pay below it does further damage to workers and our economy.”
As a result of legislation signed by Cuomo last year, New York’s minimum wage is scheduled to go up to $9 an hour by Dec. 31, 2015, and the minimum wage for tipped food service workers is still stuck at $5 an hour, with tipped hotel workers earning slightly more at $5.65 an hour.
Zenaida Mendez, president of the National Organization for Women of New York State, said the gender pay gap needs to close, and no longer allowing the subminimum wage for tipped workers would help it along.
“The poverty rate for waitresses is three times the rate for the American workforce as a whole,” said Mendez. “For this reason, the National Organization for Women is seeking to eliminate the subminimum wage for tipped workers. This pay inequality must end.”
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Janet Yellen, the first woman Fed chair, proved the skeptics wrong and got fired anyway
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Janet Yellen, the first woman Fed chair, proved the skeptics wrong and got fired anyway
On February 3, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, the first woman to lead the central bank and likely the most qualified nominee ever for the post, will exit the Fed, leaving a legacy described...
On February 3, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, the first woman to lead the central bank and likely the most qualified nominee ever for the post, will exit the Fed, leaving a legacy described as “near perfection” and with an “A” grade from a majority of economists.
And yet in 2014, the US Senate confirmed Yellen by a vote of 56-26, the lowest number of “yes” votes a confirmed Fed chair has ever received.
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When Lawsuits Protect Hardhats
New York Daily News - April 17, 2014, by Errol Louis - New York is about to embark on a historic building boom — and that has touched off a furious new round in a long-running battle about how to...
New York Daily News - April 17, 2014, by Errol Louis - New York is about to embark on a historic building boom — and that has touched off a furious new round in a long-running battle about how to protect the health and safety of the workers who create the city’s glittering skyline. This month alone, two men have fallen to their deaths while working on midtown buildings under construction — a grim reminder that the skyscrapers we boast about come at a high cost, and sometimes a tragic one.
We’ll see many more projects get off the ground in the months ahead. The de Blasio administration is set to announce plans this week to rebuild areas devastated by Hurricane Sandy, and in early May will unveil a larger plan for building or maintaining 200,000 units of housing.
That’s a lot of work to be done — and thousands of men and women needed to engage in one of the most dangerous professions in America.
In 2011 and 2012, a staggering 1,513 construction workers died on the job nationwide, more than in any other industry, according to Public Citizen, a national think tank. Thirty-six of them were in New York City.
“You literally see people who are not making a ton of money losing their lives to grow the economy of this city,” says Jose Duffy, a policy advocate at the Center for Popular Democracy, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit group.
“These are people literally dying because employers aren’t putting in basic safety regulations.”
At the center of the current fight is Local Law 240, also known as the Scaffold Law, which allows construction workers who get injured or killed on the job to sue the companies that hired them. The law was passed in the 1880s as New York began constructing the world’s first skyscrapers — and losing workers maimed or killed as the structures went up.
The construction industry has been trying for more than a century to shrink or repeal the law, and allow firms to avoid or limit liability if they can prove that an accident was the fault of the dead or injured worker. Industry lobbyists duly prowled the halls of the statehouse this year.
Lawsuits are a less-than-perfect way to force the industry to take safety seriously, but there aren’t many alternatives. Public Citizen estimates it would take the Occupational Safety and Health Administration more than 100 years to inspect every New York State construction site even once.
So workers sue when they get hurt on unsafe job sites, and insurance companies charge building companies hefty premiums in exchange for paying the claims of those killed or injured workers. A recent report by pro-industry researchers at SUNY’s Rockefeller Institute estimates that the law costs New York $150 million in economic output and 12,000 jobs — expenses imposed by insurance companies, which charge construction firms.
Duffy’s group, in turn, issued its own report this week attacking the methods and motives of the Rockefeller Institute study.
While the political battle goes on in Albany, people like Walter Cabrera are caught in the middle. Speaking through a translator, Cabrera, who came here from Peru a decade ago, told me how his supervisor had him work on a defective scaffold at 240 West Broadway in 2011.
The rig didn’t have hand rails, and Cabrera ended up falling and injuring his knee, wrist and elbow. Three years and two surgeries later, he remains unable to work and is in the process of suing the company that hired him.
While Cabrera waits out the legal process in his Jackson Heights apartment, the building he helped construct — a swank Tribeca condo now called 1 North Moore — has a penthouse that listed at $8 million and units that sold for $5 and $6 million, according to curbed.com.
It would be unthinkably immoral to build the city on the injured backs of disabled immigrant workers. Until there’s a better alternative, it looks like the Scaffold Law is here to stay.
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New York City Schools' Discriminatory and Damaging School-to-Prison Pipeline
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New York City Schools' Discriminatory and Damaging School-to-Prison Pipeline
New York City schools feed young black and Latino youth into a school-to-prison pipeline by leveling criminal punishments on students for small infractions and normal youthful behavior.
...
New York City schools feed young black and Latino youth into a school-to-prison pipeline by leveling criminal punishments on students for small infractions and normal youthful behavior.
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Nationwide protests against Trump’s family separation policy planned for June 30
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Nationwide protests against Trump’s family separation policy planned for June 30
The Women’s March is also organizing a nonviolent civil disobedience in partnership with Center for Popular Democracy and CASA in Action event for Thursday, June 28, in Washington, DC. The...
The Women’s March is also organizing a nonviolent civil disobedience in partnership with Center for Popular Democracy and CASA in Action event for Thursday, June 28, in Washington, DC. The organization is asking women if they’re ready to risk arrest — and will provide training to those willing to participate.
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Schedule Rules Prove Difficult to Implement
San Francisco — San Francisco, the country’s premier laboratory for new Internet services, is also used to innovating in municipal regulation.
But in its latest experiment, it’s starting to...
San Francisco — San Francisco, the country’s premier laboratory for new Internet services, is also used to innovating in municipal regulation.
But in its latest experiment, it’s starting to find that legislating good corporate behavior isn’t as easy as pressing a button on your smartphone.
In July, the city started implementing a first-in-the-nation law aimed at curtailing the trend toward “just-in-time” scheduling, where managers call in employees to work on short notice. The new measure requires large-chain retailers — such as Safeway and Walgreens — to publish schedules at least two weeks in advance and to compensate employees with “predictability pay” if they make changes less than a week ahead of time. It also mandates that additional hours be offered to existing employees first before new hires are made, and that part-time workers be paid at the same rate as people who work full-time.
So far, it’s been easier to publish schedules than live up to the spirit of the law.
“The two-week notice seemed to be instituted right away, but the other stuff is lagging,” said Gordon Mar, director of San Francisco Jobs With Justice, a labor-backed group that pushed for the “Retail Workers Bill of Rights” and has been monitoring its implementation.
The sluggish response may be because fines don’t kick in until Oct. 3; the city is still hashing out the rules. But the spotty compliance so far highlights the difficulty of attempts to mandate worker-friendly practices — especially the kind that touch the most fundamental aspects of business operations, rather than those that simply require higher pay and better benefits.
San Francisco employers fought the new ordinance, but couldn’t prevent its passage. Now, they complain it’s affecting service.
“We’re hearing from members in San Francisco that it really is not working well at all,” said Ronald Fong, president of the California Grocers Association. Stores can’t always predict surges in foot traffic, which might be brought on by a sunny day, leaving managers without the option to bring in more staff. That was a problem during the heat wave that swept over San Francisco this summer.
“Supplies weren’t able to get out to the shelves,” Fong said. “It just kind of snowballed, and our customers have a bad experience, or the stores lose sales.”
Some businesses don’t mind the rules in principle, but object to the red tape. “Everybody pretty much operates on a predictive schedule,” said Bill Dombrowski, president of the California Retailers Association. “But the process of implementing this, with offering the employees hours in writing and waiting three days for a response, it’s a lot of government intrusion into very minute detail.”
Also, not all industries schedule their workers in the same way. Milton Moritz is president of the National Association of Theatre Owners’ California and Nevada chapter, and said the theater business is by nature unpredictable, making the new law particularly difficult to comply with.
“We might not know until the Monday before the Friday a film shows, and even then we’re hiring, firing, scheduling people based on the business that film’s going to do,” Moritz said. “This ordinance flies in the face of all that. It really complicates the issue tremendously.”
The San Francisco ordinance hasn’t just been irritating for big companies. Some workers grumble the law discourages employers from offering extra shifts on short notice, because they would have to pay the last-minute schedule change penalty — even if workers would be happy for the chance to pick up more hours.
Rachel Deutsch, a senior staff attorney with the Center for Popular Democracy who has been helping local jurisdictions across the country craft fair-scheduling legislation, said that’s something that might change in future iterations.
“I think that’s the thing with any policy where it’s the first attempt to solve a complicated economic problem,” Deutsch said. “It’s been a learning process.”
So far, fair scheduling laws aren’t spreading as quickly as minimum wage and paid sick leave laws. A statewide bill in California failed a couple weeks ago, and no other local ordinances have passed besides San Francisco’s, though there are active campaigns in several cities including Minneapolis and Washington, D.C.
Meanwhile, several companies have acted on their own to curb some of the practices that workers have found most disruptive, like on-call shifts, where workers have to be available even if they aren’t ultimately asked to work. But in some cases — like that of Starbucks, which committed to eliminating many of those practices — those voluntary changes haven’t been any more effective than government mandates.
Erin Hurley worked at Bath & Body Works and campaigned for an end to on-call shifts. After she left the job, parent company L Brands said it would stop the practice at Bath & Body Works as well as another of its chains, Victoria’s Secret. But Hurley said she’s heard from current workers that managers are still doing effectively the same thing, by asking employees to stay a little longer.
“On-call shifts were replaced with shift extensions,” said Hurley. “Basically what L Brands did was change the name of the practice.” Keeping people on-call is very convenient for employers, and letting it go can be easier said than done. L Brands did not respond to a request for comment.
Still, advocates in San Francisco think the Retail Workers Bill of Rights has already done some good, and will be more effective when the city’s enforcement kicks into high gear — just like overtime rules did, when companies got used to obeying them.
Take Michelle Flores, 21, who has worked part time at Safeway for two years to support herself while in going to college. Unpredictable schedules made that difficult: She would only know her shifts a few days beforehand, which sometimes didn’t leave her enough time to hit the books.
“I would study from midnight until 5, 6 a.m., sleep for two or three hours, and then go to the exam,” said Flores, 21, who attends San Francisco State. This year, she expects that to change. “If I know that I have a shift scheduled, I’ll just study another day,” Flores said.
Also, the law came with some funding for community organizations to make employees aware of what workers are entitled to. That has ancillary effects — like getting people interested in joining a union, which can be better equipped to make sure companies are following the rules.
“It just creates an opportunity to talk to more workers about their rights under the law, and that leads to conversations about other issues in the workplace,” said Gordon Mar, of Jobs with Justice. “And that could lead to getting organized.”
Source: Valley News
AVENGERS CAST RAISES $500,000 FOR PUERTO RICO RELIEF EFFORTS
Maria Fund coordinator Xiomara Caro also issued a statement regarding the event: "We are deeply grateful to Scarlett Johansson, Kenny Leon and everyone involved in the production of this play for...
Maria Fund coordinator Xiomara Caro also issued a statement regarding the event: "We are deeply grateful to Scarlett Johansson, Kenny Leon and everyone involved in the production of this play for stepping up and contributing their talent to help towards the equitable and just rebuilding of Puerto Rico. This event demonstrates the importance of collective solidarity and responsibility and how powerful it is when we come together to help our communities." All proceeds from the event will go to the Maria Fund, which supports recovery efforts in Puerto Rico and rebuilding funds for low-income housing.
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