CPD IN THE NEWS

As cities all over the state have raised their minimum wages in recent years, labor advocates in the Bay Area are turning to what they see as another piece of the puzzle for improving workers’ lives: scheduling.

From ensuring workers get the full-time hours they desire, to preventing retaliation against them for turning down last-minute schedule changes, several initiatives are aimed at making employees’ schedules more stable and reducing underemployment.

“Now, it’s about getting fair wages and fair hours,” said Jennifer Lin, deputy director of the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE).

Business interests have railed against the idea of regulating scheduling across diverse sectors, and warn of unintended consequences that could actually hurt workers looking for additional hours and flexibility in their schedules.

Angie Manetti, director of government affairs for the California Retailers Association, said that has already happened in San Francisco since that city’s Retail Workers Bill of Rights was passed last year. Managers now choose to leave shifts unfilled to avoid penalty pay from scheduling workers on short notice, leaving heavier workloads on the employees who are working, she said.

San Jose’s Opportunity to Work initiative, an ordinance on the ballot Nov. 8, would require businesses there to offer extra hours to part-time employees before hiring more workers.

The initiative would apply to businesses with 35 or more employees but exclude government jobs and allow companies to apply for a “hardship” exemption.

Dilsa Gonzalez, a San Jose resident who has held a variety of positions in the fast food sector there, hopes the measure will support people like her. Gonzalez works 16 hours per week, but she would like to work 40. When she asks supervisors for additional hours, they tell her there is no work available.

“But then they hire other people,” Gonzalez said through a translator. She tries other means of making money, including recycling or helping her husband, a mechanic, work. But in San Jose, it’s “hard to survive with just a few hours of work,” she said.

“There is a crisis of underemployment in Silicon Valley,” said Ben Field, executive officer of the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council, which gathered the required signatures to place the measure on the ballot. “It’s symptomatic of a problem across the country in which more and more wage earners are dependent on part-time work as a main source of income.”

Matthew Mahood, CEO of the San Jose Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce, counters that the San Jose ordinance would “pit workers against each other” for full-time hours rather than creating more jobs and that the ordinance is too far-reaching.

Meanwhile, in the East Bay city of Emeryville, the City Council passed its “Fair Work Week Initiative” last week.

The initiative requires retail and fast food establishments that have more than 56 employees globally to:

• provide employee schedules two weeks in advance of their shifts;

• allow employees to decline schedule changes that happen within seven days of the changed shift;

• offer extra hours to part-time employees before bringing on new ones;

• provide employees with extra pay for taking on shifts on short notice, known as “predictability pay.”

The initiative also would require employers to allow employees to deny back-to-back closing and opening shifts and to request alternate work schedules without retaliation.

Emeryville has often been a trendsetter when it comes to passing worker protection legislation, EBASE’s Lin said. That includes the $14.44-per-hour minimum wage it established last year that at the time was the highest in the nation. She hopes to push the effort throughout the East Bay in the near future.

Moriah Larkins, an Oakland resident who has worked in retail in Emeryville for five years, is among those who say the unpredictability of retail scheduling has made life difficult. As a single mother, Larkins said, taking on last-minute shifts was difficult because child care is not easy to schedule, but she also often did not get scheduled as many hours as she wanted to pay her bills.

She now works at Home Depot, where her schedule is more secure, allowing her to plan better for her family and financially, she said. Home Depot store manager Lionel Stevens said at the City Council meeting that it issues schedules three weeks in advance, and has an open-door policy for employees who need flexibility.

A study commissioned by Emeryville indicates that relatively few workers believe work scheduling has a negative effect on their life. According to the study, 87 percent of employees said they have influence in creating their schedules, and 76 percent said their schedule has never changed with less than 24 hours of notice.

A separate study led by the backers of the Fair Work Week initiative, EBASE, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and the Center for Public Democracy found different results: that more workers — roughly two-thirds — get their schedule less than a week in advance and want to work more hours.

Many workers believe an ordinance is needed to close any loopholes for businesses who are not scheduling fairly.

Kelby Peeler, a Union City resident who worked at Barnes and Noble for seven years, said he would often be scheduled 30 hours one week and 10 the next, making it impossible to plan financially, and he often lost sleep with late-night closing shifts paired with opening shifts the next day.

“There are definitely good actors — it’s not like every store is having these problems,” Peeler said. “But you can’t have your schedule based on the whim of a manager.”

By ANNIE SCIACCA

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A former Federal Reserve adviser is joining with an activist group to argue for overhauls at the central bank that they say would distance it from Wall Street and make its activities more transparent and accountable to the public.

Dartmouth College economics professor Andrew Levin—special adviser to Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen between 2010 and 2012 when they were Fed chairman and vice chairwoman—is pressing for the overhaul with Fed Up coalition activists.

Dartmouth College economics professor Andrew Levin, special adviser to then Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke between 2010 to 2012, is pressing for the overhaul with Fed Up coalition activists. Many of the proposed changes target the 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks, which are quasi-private and technically owned by commercial banks in their respective districts.

“A lot of people would be stunned to know” the extent to which the Federal Reserve is privately owned, Mr. Levin said. The Fed “should be a fully public institution just like every other central bank” in the developed world, he said in a conference call announcing the plan. He described his proposals as “sensible, pragmatic and nonpartisan.”

The former central bank staffer said he sees his ideas as designed to maintain the virtues the central bank already brings to the table. They aren’t targeted at changing how policy is conducted today. “What’s important here is that reform to the Federal Reserve can last for 100 years, not just the near term,” he said.

That said, what is being sought by Mr. Levin and the activists is significant and would require congressional action. Ady Barkan, who leads the Fed Up campaign, said the Fed’s current structure “is an embarrassment to America” and Fed leaders haven’t been “willing or able” to make changes.

A Federal Reserve spokesman declined to address the proposal.

Mr. Levin wants the 12 regional Fed banks to be brought fully into the government. He also wants the process of selecting new bank presidents—they are key regulators and contributors in setting interest-rate policy—opened up more fully to public input, as well as term limits for Fed officials.

Mr. Levin’s proposal was made in conjunction with the Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up coalition, a group that has been pressuring the central bank for more accountability for some time. The left-leaning group has been critical of the structure of the regional banks, and has been pressing the Fed to hold off on raising rates in a bid to make sure the recovery is enjoyed not just by the wealthy, in their view.

The proposal was revealed on a conference call that also included a representative from Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, although all campaigns were invited to participate.

Mr. Levin says the members of the regional Fed bank boards of directors, the majority of whom are selected by the private banks with the approval of the Washington-based governors, should be chosen differently. The professor says director slots now reserved for financial professionals regulated by the Fed should be eliminated, and that directors who oversee and advise the regional banks should be selected in a public process involving the Washington governors and local elected officials. These directors also should better represent the diversity of the U.S.

Mr. Levin also wants formal public input into the selection of new bank presidents, with candidates’ names known publicly and a process that allows for public comment in a way that doesn’t now exist. The professor also wants all Fed officials to serve for single seven-year terms, which would give them the needed distance from the political process while eliminating situations where some policy makers stay at the bank for decades. Alan Greenspan, for example, was Fed chairman from 1987 to 2006.

With multiple vacancies in recent years, the selection of regional bank presidents has become a hot-button issue. Currently, the leaders of the New York, Philadelphia, Dallas and Minneapolis Fed banks are helmed by men who formerly worked for or had close connections to investment bank Goldman Sachs.

Mr. Levin called for watchdog agency the Government Accountability Office to annually review and report on Fed operations, including the regional Fed banks. He also wants the regional Fed banks to be covered under the Freedom of Information Act. A regular annual review hopefully would insulate the effort from perceptions of political interference, Mr. Levin said.

By Michael S. Derby 

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The response by the US Department of Justice to exposing Baltimore Police Department (BPD) violations of citizens’ constitutional rights falls short of addressing the systemic problem of racism in US policing, activists said.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — "[The Department of Justice] is being forced to look like it is responsive, so to speak, but it also can’t deal with the systemic nature of things," Pan-African Community Action activist Netfa Freeman told Sputnik.

On Wednesday, the Justice Department released a report concluding that the BPD systematically engaged in conduct that violates the US Constitution, and disproportionately targets African-Americans. In response, the Justice Department entered into a consent agreement with the BPD to reform the latter.

"We know it is not just Baltimore and it’s not just ‘bad apples’," Freeman said. The report is still "treating things like they are isolated incidents, not like it is a systemic problem or an epidemic," he said of anti-black police misconduct.

In a forum hosted by the Institute for Policy Studies, policy advocate at the Center for Popular Democracy, Marbre Stahly-Butts, said that while it was "important" for the federal government to articulate the problem of police abuses, Justice Department's actions did not go far enough.

An anti-terrorism rehearsal is held targeting a possible bomb attack during the Olympic Games at the main bus station in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on May 12, 2016

Stahly-Butts argued the Justice Department should leverage the findings of the report to cut off funding to local law enforcement caught violating federal law.

"If we find… that you are violating the basic human rights of people in this city, we, as the government, will not give you taxpayer money to do that," Stahly-Butts said.

The Justice Department report covered police misconduct that took place from January 2010 through May 2015. The investigation was launched in 2015 following the widely publicized death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African-American who died from wounds he sustained while in BPD custody.

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