CPD IN THE NEWS

Later this month, the world's top financial and economic policymakers will pow-wow at the Federal Reserve Bank annual meeting in Jackson Hole to determine whether it is time for the Fed to roll back recession-era policies -- e.g. a near-zero benchmark interest rate -- put in place to support job growth and recovery.

This would be the wrong decision for the communities that are still struggling to recover and the wrong decision for America. Advocates for higher interest rates point to an improving job market as a sign that America has come back from the recession. But many activists, economists, and community groups know that raising interest rates now would stymie the many communities, particularly those of color, that continue to face persistent unemployment, underemployment, and stagnant wages. As the Fed Up campaign, headed by the Center for Popular Democracy, notes in areport released this week, tackling the crisis of employment in this country is a powerful and necessary step toward building an economic recovery that reaches all Americans -- and ultimately, toward building a stronger economy for everyone.

The report, "Full Employment for All: The Social and Economic Benefits of Race and Gender Equity in Employment," shares a new data analysis by PolicyLink and the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE) estimating the boost to the economy that full employment -- defined as an unemployment rate of 4 percent for all communities and demographics along with increases in labor force participation -- would provide. While overall unemployment is down to 5.3 percent, it is still 9.1 percent for blacks and 6.8 percent for Latinos. Underemployment and stagnant wages have further driven income inequality and hinder the success of local economies. By keeping interest rates low, the Fed can promote continued job creation that leads to tighter labor markets, higher wages, less discrimination, and better job opportunities -- especially within those communities still struggling post-recession.

Lowering unemployment to 4 percent for all gender and racial groups (the rate of overall unemployment in 2000 when the economy was last at full employment) and increasing labor force participation rates would mean that 14.3 million more Americans are employed, 9.3 million fewer would live in poverty, GDP would increase by $1.3 trillion, and the government would receive an additional $261 billion in tax revenue, according to the report.

Full employment would also have an enormous positive impact on racial inequities in income. Currently, only half of workers of color make at least a living wage ($15/hour), compared to 69 percent of white workers, and median household income within communities of color is significantly lower compared to white households. With full employment, black households would see their incomes rise 23 percent, Latino households would see a 14 percent increase, and Native American households would see a 32 percent increase.

Armed with this data, which was compiled as part of ongoing economic research by PolicyLink and PERE's National Equity Atlas team, Fed Up will host its own meeting in Jackson Hole, featuring presentations by this team, activists, economists, and community organizers. This meeting, concurrent with the Fed's, aims to put pressure on the Federal Reserve to acknowledge those communities of color still mired in the recession and take up policies that will bring full employment to all. While Federal Reserve policies are not the only solution to boosting employment among those communities so often left behind, they are a vital and necessary step towards building a stronger, more inclusive American economy.

Source: Huffington Post Politics

Metro - February 13, 2013, by Alison Brown -

They are working full time, but they are living in poverty.

One day after President Barack Obama said America should not be a place where people working 4o-hour weeks are still in poverty, New York workers said that reality exists all too often.

During his State of the Union address Tuesday night, Obama said a family with two kids earning minimum wage lives below the poverty line.

“That’s wrong,” he said. “In the wealthiest nation on earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty.”

Obama suggested raising the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour.

New Yorkers want even more – raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour would give full-time workers an annual salary of $20,000, according to a report released today.

Right now, about 1.7 million New Yorkers are trying to live on about $18,530 for a family of three, according to the report. Meanwhile, unemployment increased from 5.3 percent in 2007 to 9.7 percent now, the report noted.

And more than 110,000 full-time workers live in poverty, according to the report, authored by groups The Center for Popular Democracy and UnitedNY.

Many of these are in the low-wage industry, like car wash workers, who often work more than 60 hours a week but make less than $400 per week.

And some are tasked with important services, like airport screening. The report said a survey of 300 airline employees found them paid barely more than $8 per hour.

Last year, many rallied outside their workplaces, with retail workers standing outside the Fifth Avenue Abercrombie & Fitch to demand higher wages. JFK workers also threatened to strike before the 2012 holiday season. And fast-food employees went on strike in November to demand nearly doubling their salary to $15 an hour.

“You can’t even afford to get sick, “ McDonald’s worker Linda Archer told Metro while striking.

The report referenced the struggle to pay New York City prices on a retail or car-wash paycheck.

“After working as a cashier at Abercrombie & Fitch for over a year, I ended up with an average of just 10 hours per week,” one worker said. “That’s not enough to live on and go to school.”

A car wash worker in the report added, “I came to this ‘land of opportunity’ with so many hopes, but I have become disillusioned about being able to help my family.”

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If Congress won’t focus on a new policy idea, and if state legislatures are indifferent or hostile, why not skip them both and start at the city level?

That’s the approach with a proposed law in San Francisco to require businesses there to pay for employees’ parental leaves.

It might seem like a progressive pipe dream, the kind of liberal policy that could happen only in a place like San Francisco. But Scott Wiener, the city and county supervisor who proposed the policy, sees it differently.

“The more local jurisdictions that tackle these issues, the more momentum there is for statewide and eventually national action,” he said.

It’s part of a broader movement, mostly led by liberal policy makers, to take on not just the duties that make cities run — like road maintenance and recycling — but also bigger political issues. Think soda taxes, universal health care, calorie counts on menus, mandatory composting and bans on smoking indoors.

The federal government is too gridlocked to make anything happen, these policy makers say. So they are turning to cities, hoping they can act as incubators for ideas and pave the way for state and federal governments to follow.

Conservatives used the strategy in the 1960s and 1970s, often for anti-regulatory policies. On the liberal side, Baltimore helped inspire others by passing a living wage law in 1994. The method has grown more popular in recent years, said Margaret Weir, a professor at Brown University who studies urban politics.

“Historically, especially for groups that want more government action and more generous social and economic policies, they could go to the federal government and achieve those things,” Ms. Weir said. “That has become more difficult. It’s a reflection of the loss of power at the federal level.”

Opponents have frequently responded by trying to limit the legislative power of cities. Many states have passed so-called pre-emption laws, which block cities from making their own laws on certain issues, including gun control, plastic bag bans, paid leave, fracking, union membership and the minimum wage. It’s a strategy pioneered by the tobacco lobby and later much used by the National Rifle Association. In all but seven states, state laws pre-empt local gun laws.

The pro-business American Legislative Exchange Council, known as ALEC, has pushed for many of the pre-emption laws. More recently, however, it has adopted the methods of its opponents. It has helped policy makers in local government make laws to reduce the size of government, for instance, even when states decline to do so.

One division of ALEC, called the American City County Exchange, has most notably pushed for local right-to-work laws to allow workers who are members of a union to opt out of paying dues. Yet in other cases, it has drafted legislation to prevent cities from coming up with their own laws, including on issues like plastic bag bans and containers for composting.

“Sometimes cities and counties overstep the powers they’ve been given,” said Jon Russell, director of the exchange and a town councilman in Culpeper, Va. “There are certain times states and cities are going to disagree, but for the most part, we’re going to figure out ways to resolve certain regulatory issues while staying in our lanes.”

The demographics of big urban centers — often more liberal and diverse than other parts of the country, and more likely to be governed by a single party — foster more progressive policy-making than elsewhere.

And that policy-making does seem to bubble upward to the national level. Workers’ rights are one of the main focuses of today’s urban politics, and several such city policies are now getting state and national attention, including in the presidential campaign. Paid sick leave is an example. The first city to require it was San Francisco in 2006. It is now the law in 23 cities and states, and President Obama last fall required federal contractorsto provide it. (Meanwhile, more than a dozen states have pre-emption laws to stop cities from requiring paid sick leave.)

Minimum wage is another example. SeaTac, Wash., passed a $15 minimum wage in 2013. Nearby Seattle followed, and then so did San Francisco, Los Angeles, Mountain View, Calif., and Emeryville, Calif.

Fourteen states have since changed their minimum wage laws, two bills in Congress would do the same nationally, and all three Democratic presidential contenders have said they would raise the federal minimum wage.

“It’s all due to victories at the city level,” said Ady Barkan, co-director of Local Progress, a network of local progressive elected officials. “They actually did it and showed it was possible politically and as a policy matter.”

But many of these policies have not caught on widely. Take soda taxes: Berkeley, Calif., is the only city to have passed one. Similar laws have failed in San Francisco and New York state.

Other city legislation that could eventually be passed at the state or federal level includes those related to drones, ride-hailing and home-sharing.

San Francisco’s paid parental leave policy, which would be the first such law in the nation, would apply to all businesses with at least 20 employees, some of whom work at least some of the time in the city, including national chains that do not offer paid leave to workers elsewhere.

Californians already receive paid parental leave from the state. It is one of three states to offer it; the state’s temporary disability fund pays 55 percent of workers’ salaries, up to a maximum salary of $105,000. In San Francisco, companies would pay the remainder for six weeks of “bonding leave” for all new parents, including fathers, same-sex parents and adoptive parents.

The city’s board of supervisors, which will vote on the policy, has not a single Republican. It would be a much harder sell almost anywhere else.

From Mr. Wiener’s point of view, that gives the board a responsibility: “To push the envelope on these issues, because we can.”

Source: New York Times

Last week, Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner rejected bipartisan legislation that would set up a system of Automatic Voter Registration and make it easier for millions of Illinois residents to exercise their right to vote.

It is disappointing that Gov. Rauner would stand in the way of such visionary reform, especially when the need to protect voting rights is front and center in the national consciousness. Court decisions in the past month from North Carolina to Kansas have rolled back laws that put unnecessary and discriminatory restrictions on the right to vote. These decisions specifically called out lawmakers for leaning on illusory claims of voter fraud to support voter IDs and other discriminatory obstacles to voting, obstacles that disproportionately hurt communities of color.

Rauner used the same misleading arguments to justify blocking the law, singling out the possibility of non-citizen voting – even though voter fraud by citizens and non-citizens alike is miniscule, in Illinois and elsewhere. But Rauner ignored that fact, instead tapping into a dangerous national narrative used to spread fear and hatred against immigrants and other minority groups.

Automatic voter registration, in fact, makes registration more secure and more accurate. Voter restrictions, not the phantom menace of voter fraud, are the real threats to our democracy.

We hoped that Gov. Rauner would reject such specious claims and put himself on the side of more access to voter registration, not less.

Rauner’s veto comes just days after a lawsuit was filed to try to block the state’s 2015 same-day voter registration law from going into effect this November. Like automatic voter registration, same-day registration reduces unnecessary barriers to registration so that all eligible voters can make their voices heard. The attack on same-day registration resembles recent efforts to suppress voter registration and turnout in other states.

Now, with this one-two punch, Illinois’s democracy could take a hit, closing off viable paths to the polls for many of its citizens.

Rather than maintaining unnecessary barriers, lawmakers should be expanding access to the franchise. After all, we have seen what happens without such proactive efforts. In the past few years, 17 states enacted new laws restricting the right to vote, emboldened by a 2013 Supreme Court decision that gutted decades-old protections against discriminatory voting rules.

Until this veto, Illinois was set to go down a different path. A majority of Illinois lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans, came together to strengthen our democracy. They supported a commonsense law that would simply add eligible citizens to the rolls by default when they sign up for a driver’s license or change their address – while including safeguards to ensure only eligible voters could be signed up and an option for residents to opt out of registration. The Illinois law would sweep aside barriers to registration that have disproportionately hit communities of color, young people and low-income communities for far too long.

In passing the law, the Illinois General Assembly followed in the footsteps of four other states who have passed automatic voter registration: Oregon, West Virginia, Vermont and California. And with automatic voter registration under consideration in a slew of states across the country, the Illinois law could serve as a model for other states to follow.

However, this veto doesn’t mean we should sit back and accept defeat. The right to vote—and a fair, efficient, and modern registration system that allows everyone to access that right—is too important for all of us not to fight for.

Later this year, the Illinois General Assembly will consider overriding the veto in a special session. We urge Illinois lawmakers from both sides of the aisle to once again stand up and ensure automatic voter registration goes into law.

Yet the message Gov. Rauner sent with his veto will not go unheard. He has put himself firmly on the side of those seeking to weaken voting rights, rather than strengthen them.

We hope the Illinois lawmakers who worked hard to pass this important legislation will vote in a different direction this fall. With the stakes high, it is critical Illinois ensures all eligible citizens can exercise their right to vote.

By Lawrence Benito and Emma Greenman

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