Why Fair Job Scheduling for Low-Wage Workers Is a Racial Justice Issue
Over the past few years, two movements have exploded into the public’s consciousness. In the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder and police killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Sandra...
Over the past few years, two movements have exploded into the public’s consciousness. In the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder and police killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland and many other people of color, Black Lives Matter has emerged as a powerful set of voices calling for racial justice, including an end to racially motivated violence.
At the same time, a growing movement of low-wage workers demanding higher wages and paid sick time has led some corporations to improve their policies for workers, and to dozens of localities and states adopting minimum wage increases and paid sick days laws.
The next frontier in the fight for fair workplaces is job scheduling. Protests by retail and food workers, high-profile New York Times articles, and other subsequent media coverage of workers experiencing erratic, unpredictable schedules has led to public outcry, the introduction of federal legislation to improve work schedules, and more than a dozen state and local proposed laws.
There is considerable overlap between these issues and the activists that are at the center of both movements. As Ron Harris, an organizer at the Twin Cities-based group Neighborhoods Organizing for Change (NOC), explains, people “don’t live single-issue lives. … The people getting shot are low-wage folks. … They are over-policed and under-resourced.”
I spoke with Harris to learn how NOC is leading the fight for fair scheduling in Minneapolis by taking an approach grounded in a commitment to racial justice. The campaign demonstrates the possibilities that emerge when advocates connect the dots between job quality issues and racial justice in their strategy and messaging.
Tell me about your organization, Neighborhoods Organizing for Change (NOC)
NOC is a non-profit that focuses on work at the intersection of race, public policy and the economy. Our members are primarily low-wage Black folks living in north Minneapolis. Our mission is to shift the balance of power between folks who have and folks who don’t have, and in our opinion, the folks who don’t have are low-income black people in Minneapolis.
We derive a lot of our ideas about what issues we will work on from the bottom up. At monthly meetings called “issue cuts,” we discuss the issues and members vet the ones we will work on.
This past year we worked on a series of local future of work proposals, including fair scheduling, earned sick and safe time [time to deal with domestic or sexual violence], a policy to end rampant wage theft and raising the minimum wage to $15. We’re also working on police reform; we made a series of demands of our local police department, and in 2016 we will take those to the state level. We led the charge in repealing two laws that only two cities in the country have—“lurking laws” and “spitting laws.”
If you spit in Minneapolis, for instance, you can get a misdemeanor. These laws were targeting low-income black people, black men in particular. We beat that law in Minneapolis—now it is gone.
We also work on voter restoration. There are approximately 47,000 people in Minnesota who don’t have the right to vote because of a past criminal conviction. We’re working on a bill at the state level to end that. And we’re working with the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) on their Federal Reserve campaign, engaging with National Fed and Local Fed banks in town, working on influencing economic policy and who is elected to those boards.
How has NOC been involved with organizing and advocacy related to fair scheduling in the Twin Cities?
We got involved with fair scheduling because members of our base were coming in saying they were working jobs where they didn’t know their schedule until the day before or even the day of. They were forced to close businesses and come right back and open up the next morning. We call this “clopening.”
So we started to work with national partners, CPD included, to come up with a fair scheduling policy that mirrors work in other cities and states. Our state government is divided [between Republicans and Democrats], so we thought we’d take this to the city level.
NOC has been heavily involved in crafting the policy. This is where the “issue cut” came in. There were a series of generic provisions in the first scheduling policy and we laid these out for our membership and asked our membership base: “What do these sound like? Are they too strong? Too weak? What’s missing?” It led to a tailored approach that reflected the voices of the members.
On the field side, we gathered hundreds and hundreds of stories of people experiencing these scheduling issues. As we gathered their stories, we brought members to city hall and took them on lobbying visits.
Why is scheduling a racial justice issue?
If you think about the folks who are the most likely to have an unfair schedule and the least likely to be able do something about, at that intersection it tends to be people of color, particularly women of color.
If they don’t have access to a fair schedule, they are likely working a low-wage job, and if they are in a low-wage job, they likely have inadequate access to transportation… and you can see how there is a domino effect.
Why is it important to frame public discussions of fair scheduling in terms of racial justice?
We frame it as a racial justice issue because, living in Minneapolis, we have some of the worst economic disparity gaps in the country. With those dynamics, we almost had to frame it that way. We thought this could be an opportunity to close some of these gaps.
The thousand of stories we collected about employers hiring new people instead of giving out more hours to their current employees or getting schedules the day before people were supposed to work—all of those stories were coming from low-income communities of color, so frankly, that was the only way we could frame it.
We thought that our city leaders and elected officials would be sensitive to the opportunity to close the gap. In 2013, a majority of the city council was elected running on some kind of racial equity platform. So, our messages to the media and to elected officials were the same: “Hey, the folks that we donated to and endorsed ran on a racial equity platform and we haven’t seen any action from them for the past couple of years. We need this now. Here’s a perfect opportunity for you to close these gaps.”
We also tried to connect the dots, highlighting that the people most likely to suffer from [unfair schedules] are those with black and brown faces. Refusing to act means that you really don’t care about these gaps. It means, you ran on these things, but you’re really not committed to acting on them.
In your outreach to “high-road” employers, is it useful to discuss the connection between scheduling and racial inequity?
We’ve been working on really trying to engage people across sectors in fixing these gaps. So, for example, it’s not just the role of the community to advocate for itself and to bring awareness to this issue. The business community has a role, too. We recognize employers’ value as job creators, but also emphasize that by changing some of their worksite practices, they can also be adding to the movement.
We frame this for employers as: “Do the best you can where you are. We all have an opportunity. We all have a role.” And it really worked with some employers.
Even though the legislation wasn’t ultimately brought to vote, because of the campaign that we ran and the stories that were brought to light, some business owners are reporting that they are already changing their practices. Maybe they were giving their schedules five days in advance and now they’re going to work towards 10 days. One landscaping company used to say, you don’t leave until the job is done. Now they say if it is 6:00 P.M. and you aren’t done, just go home and be with your family.
Although we haven’t had much luck with large chain employers, one exception is Target. They have committed to changing their scheduling practices, almost in lockstep with what we have been pushing. We have talked about this as a racial justice issue with Target. We’ve said, as the largest employer in the city, they have a really unique opportunity to make an impact [on racial equity]. They also want their customers to have more money in their pockets—they need a strong economic environment, too.
The movement for racial justice has been gaining strength and momentum around the country in the wake of police killings. Within that movement, do you think there is enough attention to job quality and fair workplace issues?
Nationally, no. Locally, definitely. With NOC and Black Lives Matter, yes, we’re talking about police brutality, but also an overall culture of injustice that exists. In Minneapolis, in particular, some of the chants are we don’t want to get shot by police—but we also want a $15 minimum wage and all these other things.
The intersection of race and the economy has been really strong here. It’s a compounding effect where if you pay attention to the folks who are getting brutalized by the police, these aren’t middle class and rich folks. These are low-income black people. They are getting stopped because they are walking down the street when they are “not supposed to be,” technically. The people getting shot by police are low-wage folks—they are over-policed and under-resourced.
What could the fair scheduling movement be doing to further highlight the racial justice aspects of scheduling issues?
Really to ground the work in story telling. Make sure you have a strong base of individuals who are actually going through [unfair scheduling] who can speak from experience. No one can deny someone’s story. Stories help to justify everything you do.
Also, get the data. We gathered data that shows that the people who are most likely to work the jobs that have unfair schedules, they are black and brown, and most likely women. The data alone reflects that this is a racial justice issue.
Build a broad-based coalition, including people who understand how to do racial analysis and member based organizations, so the members can really speak for themselves.
How can scheduling advocates support the work of racial justice advocates?
If you think about it, if people are advocating for police reform, criminal justice reform, the people they are standing up for are people who are working these crappy jobs. So, fair scheduling advocates just need to stand up and say, our people are the same exact people. They don’t lead single-issue lives, they lead lives that are compounding multiple issues.
Sex assault survivor who confronted Jeff Flake speaks out
A sex assault survivor who confronted Sen. Jeff Flake inside an elevator Friday — after announcing he would vote in favor of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh — said that the likely pivotal...
A sex assault survivor who confronted Sen. Jeff Flake inside an elevator Friday — after announcing he would vote in favor of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh — said that the likely pivotal moment “was all kind of a blur.”
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What You Need To Know About The Special Election In Arizona
What You Need To Know About The Special Election In Arizona
Ady Barkan, an ALS-stricken progressive activist whose “Be A Hero” initiative targets Republicans who voted for, or back the tax cuts, traveled to the district to campaign on Tipirneni’s behalf....
Ady Barkan, an ALS-stricken progressive activist whose “Be A Hero” initiative targets Republicans who voted for, or back the tax cuts, traveled to the district to campaign on Tipirneni’s behalf. While in Arizona, Barkan, who will need Medicare as his body deteriorates, asked Lesko to respond to the stated intentions of several Republican leaders, including House Speaker Ryan and White House budget director Mick Mulvaney, to seek major cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
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NY Daily News Letter to the Editor: Body Count
New York Daily News - April 15, 2014, by Josie Duffy - Re “Hardhat in fatal plunge” (April 15): How many more deadly accidents have to happen before the construction and insurance industries drop...
New York Daily News - April 15, 2014, by Josie Duffy - Re “Hardhat in fatal plunge” (April 15): How many more deadly accidents have to happen before the construction and insurance industries drop their campaign to weaken workplace safety laws? In the past month alone, there have been two fatal construction accidents in Midtown, underscoring the dire need to protect and expand worker safety rules, especially the Scaffold Law. Instead, construction and insurance companies are pouring money into a high-priced campaign to convince Albany to weaken common-sense safety rules that hold building owners and contractors responsible if their safety lapses lead to injuries or deaths. Weakening the law would make dangerous jobs more deadly, especially for immigrant and Latino workers who, studies show, are more likely get hurt on the job. The latest construction deaths should end this debate. Source
Former Fed Staffer, Activists Detail Plan to Overhaul Central Bank
Former Fed Staffer, Activists Detail Plan to Overhaul Central Bank
A former top Federal Reserve staffer joined with activists on Monday to lay out the mechanics of a plan to overhaul the structure of the U.S. central bank.
Dartmouth College’s Andrew Levin...
A former top Federal Reserve staffer joined with activists on Monday to lay out the mechanics of a plan to overhaul the structure of the U.S. central bank.
Dartmouth College’s Andrew Levin, who was a top adviser to former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, Jordan Haedtler of the left-leaning Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up campaign and the Economic Policy Institute’s Valerie Wilson say in a paper that their proposals amount to an important modernization of the Fed.
“The Fed’s structure is simply outdated, and that makes it harder for its decisions to serve the public,” Ms. Wilson said in a press call. “We are well aware we can’t create a dramatic shake-up” of the Fed, she said, explaining what she and her colleagues are calling for is “pragmatic and nonpartisan.”
The linchpin of the overhaul is bringing the 12 quasi-private regional Fed banks fully into government. The paper’s authors also repeated calls for bankers to be removed from regional Fed bank boards of directors, while proposing nonrenewable terms for top central bank officials and greater government oversight over Fed actions.
The paper Monday fleshed out the specifics of how the overhaul would happen, building on ideas first made public in April. “We had a ‘why,’ and now we have a ‘how,’” Mr. Levin told reporters.
Mr. Levin and Fed Up have seen successes in their campaign to overhaul the central bank. Earlier this year, congressional Democrats and the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton endorsed their push to remove bankers from the boards overseeing the 12 regional Fed banks. Fed Up’s effort to promote diversity in a central bank that is still dominated largely by white males, not withstanding the current leadership of Chairwoman Janet Yellen, also has gained traction among Democrats.
The regional Fed banks are unique among major central banks for being owned by local banks. Some fear this structure gives financial institutions undue sway over policy decisions. Fed bank presidents have countered this isn’t the case.
Regional Fed officials have acknowledged that more diversity within the central bank system would be welcome, but they have been reluctant to tinker with the current structure. The paper also proposes auditing the Fed’s monetary-policy-making functions, and that has been something officials have fought hard against, believing it will lead to bad economic outcomes.
The authors say regional Fed banks can easily be made public by canceling the shares of the member banks and refunding the capital these banks were required to keep with the Fed.
The money to do this can be created by the Fed, and the paper says the fact that the central bank no longer would have to pay dividends to the banks would help it return more of its profit to the government. Over the next decade, that could mean the Fed might return as much as $3 billion more in excess profit, helping reducing the government’s budget deficit.
A number of regional Fed bank leaders have pushed back at being made fully public. In May, New York Fed President William Dudley said “the current arrangements are actually working quite well, both in terms of preserving the Federal Reserve’s independence with respect to the conduct of monetary policy and actually leading to pretty, you know, successful outcomes.”
The paper’s authors said making the Fed fully public also would allow it to remove bankers and other financial-sector members from the boards that oversee each regional Fed bank. The authors said directors should be nominated by either a member of Congress or a state governor, subject to approval by the Fed boards.
None of these directors should be from the financial sector, to prevent the conflict of interest created by a member of a regulated financial institution overseeing the operations of their own regulator.
This, too, has drawn pushback from some on the Fed. Philadelphia Fed leader Patrick Harker said in July that “the banker from a small town in Pennsylvania provides incredibly important insight,” and he wants people like that on his board.
New bank leaders should be selected by an open process in which candidates are named publicly, with a formal mechanism for public input. All Fed officials also should serve single staggered seven-year terms, which the paper says would help insulate central bankers from political interference. The selection process of regional Fed bank leaders has long been a secretive affair. Meanwhile, the leaders of the Dallas, Minneapolis and Philadelphia Fed banks, who all took their posts since 2015, have had connections to Goldman Sachs, which has drawn criticism from the Fed Up campaign. Mr. Dudley at the New York Fed was once that firm’s chief economist.
The authors also would like to subject Fed monetary policy decisions to Government Accountability Office audits. To ensure this oversight doesn’t interfere with Fed decision-making, the paper calls for the audits to be done annually and not at the request of a member of Congress, and the GAO shouldn’t be able to comment on any given interest-rate decision.
The paper calls for the Fed to release a quarterly monetary policy report that describes officials’ views on policy, the economy’s performance relative to the Fed’s official price and job mandates, forecasts and a description of risks, and a description of any models driving policy-making.
Any changes to the Fed are ultimately up to elected officials. In February, Ms. Yellen told legislators “the structure could be something different and it’s up to Congress to decide that—I certainly respect that.”
By Michael S. Derby
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GOP accuses Dems of stalling Kavanaugh over document requests
Jennifer Epps-Addison, network president at the grassroots Center for Popular Democracy, stressed that public access to Kavanaugh's legal opinions and documents from his time in the Bush...
Jennifer Epps-Addison, network president at the grassroots Center for Popular Democracy, stressed that public access to Kavanaugh's legal opinions and documents from his time in the Bush administration is "the bare minimum of transparency Americans should expect before confirming a Supreme Court nominee."
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Who’s truly rebuilding the Democratic Party? The activists.
In June 2010 I made a very bad tweet that I came to regret. (Hard to imagine, I know.) I yelled at the disability rights group Adapt.
I’d come to DC to attend a conference of progressive...
In June 2010 I made a very bad tweet that I came to regret. (Hard to imagine, I know.) I yelled at the disability rights group Adapt.
I’d come to DC to attend a conference of progressive leaders, “America’s Future Now.” And while I knew a lot about financial reform, I didn’t know enough about politics, activism, or the Democratic Party.
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A 'striking lack of diversity' at the Fed distorts economic policy in ways most people don’t consider
A 'striking lack of diversity' at the Fed distorts economic policy in ways most people don’t consider
In a new report from the liberal-leaning Fed Up, a coalition of community groups advocating for continued low interest rates from the Fed with a view to helping the country's poorer families enjoy...
In a new report from the liberal-leaning Fed Up, a coalition of community groups advocating for continued low interest rates from the Fed with a view to helping the country's poorer families enjoy some of the benefits of the recovery, the group says a lot of work remains to be done despite recent progress on diversity under Yellen's tenure.
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California Eminent Domain Isn't Government Run Amok
To judge from the disparaging reaction to its plan to use eminent domain to cope with underwater homes, you'd think the city leaders of Richmond, California, had proposed an outrageous and...
To judge from the disparaging reaction to its plan to use eminent domain to cope with underwater homes, you'd think the city leaders of Richmond, California, had proposed an outrageous and unprecedented distortion of state power.
Filing suit against Richmond, BlackRock Inc., Pacific Investment Management Co. and other plaintiffs alleged that the city's proposal amounts to an “unconstitutional application of eminent domain” and a “brazen scheme.” The Federal Housing Finance Agency announced that it was considering ceasingto do business in municipalities that pursue this course. Media coverage generally echoed the plaintiffs’ take. USA Today’s headline summed up the conventional wisdom, declaring that Richmond “runs amok with eminent domain.”
In fact, the city's plan relies not on a novel use of eminent domain but on one endorsed by the conservative Supreme Court of 1935. And although there is a long history of excessive use of eminent domain, Richmond's plan has no place in it. Richmond's plan is to seize 624 mortgages valued at more than the homes for which they were written. Relying on a private intermediary, the city would compensate the investor holding a mortgage at a price reflecting the home's current value rather than an inflated bubble value. The city would then sell a more modest loan to the homeowner. Richmond hopes this will induce residents to remain in their homes and pay their mortgages and property taxes. Proponents of the plan also point out that this probably will lower the risk of default, protecting investors holding the mortgages.
Nonetheless, the big players in the bond markets are angry that they’re being forced to accede to the demands of a small city in California. Before they fight city hall, the plaintiffs should appreciate that use of eminent domain to seize intangible assets like mortgages has a solid history. Federal courts have long sanctioned the taking of everything from shares of stock to contract rights, insurance policies and even hunting rights.
But mortgages? Yes. Consider a famous Supreme Court case from the Great Depression. During that crisis, banks foreclosed on farmers who fell behind on their mortgage payments. In response, Congress passed the Farm Bankruptcy Act granting farmers five years to negotiate a reduction in the principal of their loans. Farmers were entitled to buy the property at the current appraised value, even if it fell short of the value attached to the original mortgage.
Then, as now, banks didn’t like the policy and went to court, arguing that it violated their property rights, as guaranteed under the Fifth Amendment. In May 1935, the Supreme Court overturned the law in a unanimous decision, the first of several such rulings that made the court into a conservative counterweight to the New Deal. Nevertheless, in the final paragraph of its decision, the court laid out an alternative course for just the kind of remedy the Farm Bankruptcy Act had sought.
Justice Louis Brandeis observed, "If the public interest requires, and permits, the taking of property of individual mortgagees in order to relieve the necessities of individual mortgagors, resort must be had to proceedings by eminent domain.”
In effect, the court stated that if the government wished to modify loans, it could only do so via an eminent domain proceeding of precisely the sort now being contemplated in Richmond. Brandeis didn’t think this a particularly controversial point; he made no effort to defend it or explain his reasoning because it was an established doctrine.
And so it remains today: Intangible assets have again and again been deemed fair game for eminent domain proceedings, so long as “just compensation” is given. In California, the state Supreme Court has taken a similar stance: A decision in 2008, for example, affirmed longstanding precedent that the state’s eminent domain law “authorizes the taking of intangible property.”
None of this is to suggest that eminent domain hasn’t been abused. In the postwar era, however, its victims have not been investors but poor, black, inner city residents.
The case that opened the door to mass evictions and confiscations was Berman v. Parker, decided by the Supreme Court in 1954. In it, a black department store owner in the District of Columbia sued to stop an eminent domain proceeding against his profitable business, which had the misfortune of being situated in an area designated as blighted.
The court rejected Berman’s protest, defining eminent domain in remarkably broad terms. If the public interest demanded that his property be torn down with less desirable properties to rescue an entire neighborhood from blight, it ruled, there was nothing Berman could do. His store was soon reduced to rubble. While many urban planners celebrated the decision, Harvard Law School Professor Charles Haar was more prescient, noting that the ruling “may cause a lot of trouble some day.”
This was an understatement: in the ensuing years, municipalities across the country used and abused their powers to confiscate the property of poor, often black residents, rarely giving “just compensation.” Entire, thriving neighborhoods vanished before the wrecking ball, destroying communities and leaving behind gaping holes in the urban fabric that remain eyesores in many cities today.
This didn’t end with the 1960s. In 2005, the Supreme Court handed down its controversial decision in Kelo v. City of New London. The case grew out of efforts by New London, Connecticut, to use eminent domain to evict working-class residents from a neighborhood in the hopes of handing the land to a private developer who promised to attract more affluent residents with a mixed-use project. The court ruled in favor of the city, vastly expanding the powers of eminent domain. The project foundered during the financial crisis and today remains a series of vacant lots, monuments to an extreme vision of eminent domain.
These are examples of eminent domain “run amok.” Yet to listen to the hysterical denunciations of the Richmond plan, a proposal to bring 624 mortgages in line with market prices is the epitome of eminent domain abuse. History suggests otherwise.
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Why You Should Care About the Federal Reserve’s Secrecy and Elitism
New Republic - Last weekend, Cee Cee Butler, a 34-year-old McDonald’s worker from Washington D.C., became sick with the flu, or at least something that resembled the flu. Her phone had been cut...
New Republic - Last weekend, Cee Cee Butler, a 34-year-old McDonald’s worker from Washington D.C., became sick with the flu, or at least something that resembled the flu. Her phone had been cut off and she missed work Friday, Saturday and Sunday. “I did a ‘no-call, no-show’ for three days and I’ve never done that in over the year and a half I’ve been working here at McDonald's,” she said. “They terminated me Tuesday morning. So I lost my job, my rent is going up in December, I have two kids—19 and 5, a girl and boy—and I can’t afford to take care of them.”
On Friday, Butler gathered outside the Federal Reserve building with around two dozen activists from labor unions and progressive groups before an afternoon meeting with Fed Chair Janet Yellen. The groups are part of a new campaign called “Fed Up” that is pressuring Yellen and her colleagues to keep interest rates at zero until the recovery strengthens and wages rise. “The economy is not working for the vast majority of people,” said Ady Barkan, a lawyer from The Center for Popular Democracy, which is the lead organizer of the campaign. Fed Up wants to rectify that problem by putting direct pressure on the Federal Reserve itself—a quest that may not captivate the public’s attention but could have a very real effect on the lives of working Americans.
In August, for instance, members of Fed Up staged protests outside of the Federal Reserve’s annual monetary policy conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Many reporters there said it was the first time they could remember protestors at the conference—but their tactics must have worked, because Yellen agreed to meet with the protesters Friday afternoon in the boardroom where the Federal Open Markets Committee (FOMC) meets eight times a year to set monetary policy. Three other Federal Reserve governors—Vice Chair Stanley Fischer, Jerome Powell and Lael Brainard—joined the meeting and the activists said that Yellen was engaged throughout and was moved by the stories she heard. They hope that this meeting was just the first of many in the future.
The message the Fed Up campaign delivered is the same one voters sent loud and clear last week: The recovery is not being felt by millions of Americans. Exit polls indicated that 45 percent of voters considered the economy the most important issue of the midterms. Wage growth for low-income workers, like janitors and fast food workers, are barely keeping up with inflation. “That’s not an economic recovery,” said Jean Andre, who does location support for film production and is a member of New York Communities for Change. “That’s not the way thing should be.”
But the slow recovery isn’t always noticeable in leading economic indicators. The unemployment rate, for instance, has fallen 2.1 percentage points since the start of 2013 and is now at 5.8 percent, its lowest point in more than six years. As a result, some economists inside and outside the Fed, including inflation hawk Charles Plosser, have called for a hike in interest rates in the near future. “Beginning to raise rates sooner rather than later reduces the chance that inflation will accelerate and, in so doing, require policy to become fairly aggressive with perhaps unsettling consequences,” Plosser, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, said Wednesday.
Plosser’s worry about rising inflation, even though it is nowhere to be found, could prove dangerous. If the FOMC listens to the hawks, it will prematurely raise rates and choke off the recovery before workers see wage growth. So far, Yellen has done a good job ignoring Plosser and Co. And, luckily, Plosser and Richard Fisher, the president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank and another hawk at the FOMC, announced that they would retire in the spring of 2015, opening up two positions that have a significant impact on monetary policy. Fed Up sees their retirements as a boon—and is keen to have a say in the selection process.
Under the current rules, Plosser and Fisher’s replacements will be chosen by the board of the Philadelphia and Dallas reserve banks, respectively. Each board has nine members, three from banks and six from nonbanks—companies and organizations that are not financial institutions. Because of Dodd-Frank restrictions, only the six non-bank members are involved in selecting the replacements. But of those six members, three are chosen by banks and three are chosen by the Fed board in Washington. Workers and consumers are supposed to be represented on the board, but of the 108 members, 91 are from financial institutions and corporations. Just two are leaders of labor groups and another 15 represent non-profit organizations.
Fed Up has a list of demands to make the replacement process more transparent and to ensure the public has adequate representation within the central bank. They want a public schedule of the process, a list of criteria for how the replacements will be chosen, a chance for members to question the candidates, and public forums where citizens can discuss monetary policy with candidates and the search committee. These reforms, they hope, will keep presidents like Plosser and Fisher—who activists say are disconnected from the daily struggles of their constituents—out of office. “We need a president in Philadelphia who will listen to working people,” said Kati Slipp, the director of Pennsylvania Working Families. “Charles Plosser hasn’t been or he would not believe that our economy has really recovered.” In fact, Fed Up is already getting results. On Friday morning, the Philadelphia Fed announced that it was setting up an email to receive inquiries about the search process. “That would never have happened if this campaign hadn’t happened,” Slipp said. The campaign said it expected the same things from the Dallas Fed.
After Republicans destroyed Democrats in the midterms, many liberal commentators argued that a fresh agenda for raising wages could help the Democratic Party win back voters, particularly those in the white working class. But the problem isn’t that Democrats’ ideas—raising the minimum wage, investing in infrastructure and strengthening the safety net—won’t help middle- and lower-class Americans. It’s that the weak recovery has destroyed those ideas’ political salience. It’s a political problem much more than a policy one.
Such arguments almost always ignore monetary policy. After all, no one but Ron Paul fanatics care about the Federal Reserve. And the Fed is independent from the federal government. If a Democratic candidate’s economic message was to fill the FOMC with economists committed to keeping interest rates low or even adopting a different monetary policy regime altogether, voters would likely roll their eyes. It would be a political disaster. But given congressional gridlock, it might also be far more effective at boosting the recovery.
The Fed Up campaign isn’t going to change that. Millions of Americans will not suddenly realize that the most important economic actor in the United States is not the president or Congress but the Federal Reserve. They will not understand that some inflation is needed, especially right now, to convince businesses to invest and consumers to spend money to get the economy back going again. But the campaign may convince some Americans of the Fed’s importance. That’s why Cee Cee Butler, the former McDonald's worker who was fired Tuesday, and Jean Andre, the man who scouts out locations for films, spent a cold Friday morning outside the Fed.
“I just got out of the shelter two years ago and here I am about to be back in one. I’m not trying to go back there,” Butler said. “My daughter will never walk in my shoes. She doesn’t need to. That’s why my voice needs to be heard.”
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