CPD IN THE NEWS

San Francisco Fed President John Williams has promised more transparency after a rare meeting with a coalition of community and labor groups which also urged the U.S. central banker to keep interest rates low.

Williams largely dismissed their call to hold off on interest-rate hikes, repeating his mantra that monetary policy will depend on economic data. But he said the meeting earlier this week pushed him to "think a little more proactively" about how the Fed recruits and promotes top management.

"I want the Fed to be more transparent," Williams said in an interview. "We've learned along the way that this process of selecting presidents and other aspects of the Fed are not that clear to the public. We should make it more open."

While the San Francisco Fed is not searching for a president or first vice-president, "we want to make sure not only are we doing it right, but also in the future maybe to move the ball forward even further," he said.

He noted that the Minneapolis Fed's openness about its ongoing presidential search is one example to learn from.

The Fed's perceived opaqueness has drawn increasing fire in recent months, with Fed Chair Janet Yellen in testimony this week standing her ground against Congressional efforts to subject the Fed to more oversight. Regional Fed banks' executive searches are also under scrutiny for apparent insularity.

Williams said the meeting also reminded him that despite strengthening overall economic growth, there are "a significant number of people who are left behind and struggling."

One example is Ebony Isler, who ran a hairdressing business until recession-hit clients could not afford her services.

Now, as a part-time cashier at the San Francisco Giants' downtown ballpark, she relies on high-interest loans to bridge her paydays.

"I can't find a job that pays me enough to be self-sufficient," Isler said in an interview after she and a dozen other members of the non-profit group Fed Up met with Williams on Monday.

The group, which first grabbed national attention last summer when it crashed the Kansas City Fed's annual central bankers' meeting in Jackson Hole Wyoming, presented Williams a report arguing that as long as inflation and wage growth remains dull, the Fed should keep rates near zero. (/news/mind-gap-how-federal-reserve-can-help-raise-wages-america-s-women-and-men)

Williams regularly meets with bankers and chief executives.

Meeting with activists, he said, "helps you to think concretely about why are people out of the labor force, what are the problems they are facing."

The group has also sat down with Yellen, Kansas City Fed President Esther George and Boston Fed chief Eric Rosengren.

Source: CNBC

Para la activista Ana María Archila, víctima también de violencia sexual, el caso de Kavanaugh despierta el de muchas mujeres que han sido objeto de abuso.

Read the full article here.

Mother Jones - April 9, 2015, by Josh Harkinson - Until recently, your typical banker was someone whose main job was to accept deposits, cash checks, and dispense basic financial advice. But now that job hardly exists anymore—at least not as we once knew it. Today's front-line bank workers—tellers, loan interviewers, and customer-service reps—earn far too little money to be considered "bankers" in the traditional sense of the word. And though they still collect and dispense money, their main job involves hawking credit cards and loans you probably don't need.

Many rank and file bank workers are seeing lower wages and more pressure to hawk financial products.

Rank-and-file bank workers are both causes and symptoms of America's widening economic divide, says Aditi Sen, the author of Big Banks and the Dismantling of the Middle Class, a report released today by the Center for Popular Democracy. Based on union organizer interviews with hundreds of workers in the industry, Sen found that front-line bank workers often face quotas for hawking potentially exploitive financial products, often to low-income customers, even though the workers themselves barely qualify as middle class. "We can definitely see bank workers as part of the same continuum of issues facing all low-wage workers," she says.

Banks are, of course, notorious for squeezing profits from their employees and customers. In 2011, the Federal Reserve Board fined Wells Fargo $85 million for forcing workers to sell expensive subprime mortgages to prime borrowers. And in late 2013, a judge slapped Bank of America with a $1.27 billion penalty for its "Hustle Program," which rewarded employees for producing more loans and eliminating controls on the loans' quality.

Yet, by some accounts, these sorts of practices are getting worse. In a 2013 study by the union-backed Committee for Better Banks, 35 percent of low-level bank workers surveyed reported increased sales pressure since 2008, and nearly 38 percent stated that there was no real avenue in the workplace to oppose such practices. One HSBC bank employee, according to the study, reported that workers who failed to meet their sales goals had the difference taken out of their paychecks.

The increasing sales pressure comes at a time when the fortunes of the banks and their low-level workers have diverged widely. Bank profits and CEO pay have rebounded to near record levels while wages for front-line workers are stuck in the gutter.

And that's not all. Nearly a quarter of bank workers surveyed in 2013 reported that their benefits had been cut since 2008, and 44 percent reported that their medical and life insurance was inadequate. A recent University of California-Berkeley study found that 31 percent of bank tellers' families rely on public assistance at an annual cost of $900 million to taxpayers.

There are several factors in all of these woes. Mergers and consolidation have led some retail banks to shutter branches and lay people off. Many banks have outsourced customer-service jobs to overseas call centers, and the rise of internet and smartphone banking has further slashed demand for flesh-and-blood tellers. In other words, it's basically the same mix of foreign and technological competition that has concentrated wealth and depressed middle-class wages throughout the economy. And it means that banks can get away with paying people less, and demanding more in return.

But now the Committee for Better Banks is trying to cultivate common cause between low-level bank workers and the customers they're forced to target. The interviews featured in the new report show that many bank workers strongly oppose the sales quotas as unfair and exploitive. For instance:

A teller at a top-five bank reports that she is subject to stringent individual goals on a daily basis: If she does not make three sales-points (selling someone a new checking, savings, or debit card account) each day in a month, she gets written up.

Customer service representatives at a call center for another major bank report that each individual has to make 40 percent of the sales of the top seller to avoid being written up. Selling credit cards counts more towards sales goals than helping someone open up a checking account or savings account, thereby crafting skewed incentives based on the profitability of a product sold, not on how well it matched the needs of a customer.

"There was one guy who had three credit cards and I ended up pushing a fourth on him, even though I knew that was not good for him."

"A lot of time people would call and already have one, two, or three credit cards with us," says Liz, a member of the Committee for Better Banks who worked in a Bank of America call center for five years and did not want to give her last name. "They might have a situation where they are low on funds and we end up pushing another credit card on them. There was one guy who had three credit cards and I ended up pushing a fourth on him, even though I knew that was not good for him; he would just be in more debt. But if didn't, I would end up being put in a reprimand."

On Monday, members of the Committee for Better Banks will converge in Minnesota's Twin Cities to deliver a petition to bank offices demanding better pay and more stable work hours for rank-and-file workers, and an end to sales goals that "push unnecessary products on our customers."

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The Huffington Post - November 21, 2013, by Ana María Archila - As progressives, we need to dramatically increase our scale and reach to win. With the merger of the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) and the Leadership Center for the Common Good (LCCG) in January 2014, we are poised to do just that. The stakes are high. The crisis in American society is severe: Inequality is now at the highest level ever recorded. In 2012, the top 1 percent of U.S. households received 19.3 percent of all household income.

The income gap between white and non-white America is growing even faster. Between 2005 and 2009, median white wealth declined by 16 percent, while median black wealth dropped by 53 percent and Latino wealth declined by 66 percent. Increasing economic inequality is being matched by increasing political inequality. Our democracy and the political participation of people of color, young people and the elderly are being eroded by state legislatures, with the tacit support of the Supreme Court.

All this would be much worse of course, if not for the work of the progressive organizations and movements that have fought inequality and racism for decades.

We can, and must, go farther and faster to fight inequality, the erosion of democracy and racial injustice. There is a growing opportunity to challenge the status quo and to build a society characterized by opportunity, equality and inclusion. Increasingly strong and assertive community organizations across the country are stepping up to demand better. Immigrant organizations, worker centers, progressive unions, elected officials and people of faith are envisioning and creating more inclusive and equitable cities and states, even in spite of our failed national politics.

The most successful community campaigns present a new vision for change, a creativity and fearlessness to promote policies many have thought unachievable, as well as a canny understanding of how to navigate local political forces.

My organization, the Center for Popular Democracy, works at the center of this emerging new politics, working to build the capacity and resilience of rooted, democratic, community-organizing institutions. We feel the urgency to grow our movement, to build new strength, to share organizing models and strategies more broadly, and to replicate campaigns and tactics that work to confront racial and economic inequality.

Just as our movement needs more power and reach, so do we. That's why we are merging with the Leadership Center for the Common Good to create a newly powerful Center for Popular Democracy on January 1, 2014. Our organizations' sister c4 organizations, Action for the Common Good and Center for Popular Democracy Action Fund will also merge to create a newly powerful Action for the Common Good. Part campaign center, part capacity builder, part policy shop, our merged and expanded organizations will work together to more effectively build the strength and capacity of democratic organizations to envision and advance a pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial and economic justice agenda. From recent successes, we have a sense of what is possible when working communities are well organized, resourced and equipped to demand change. In New York, coalitions of community groups, progressive unions, and faith networks came together this year to secure a raft of impressive victories, from a raise in the state's minimum wage, to the adoption of paid sick days' legislation in New York City to the passage of pro-immigrant language access initiatives in both Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island. And, in the face of fierce opposition from outgoing Mayor Bloomberg, CPD and our allies secured passage of new laws to stop the discriminatory policing tactics of the NYPD -- Stop and Frisk. CPD brought our policy expertise, strategy insights, and coalition coordination experience to these fights -- helping drive them to victory.

The New York victories mirror the work we are engaged in across the country -- in 27 states with more than 90 partners nationally. Through strategic and sustained local and state victories, driven by strong community and labor partners, and supported in important ways by CPD, we can secure tangible improvements in working people's lives and generate the upward pressure and momentum necessary to refocus national policy on furthering values of equity, opportunity and democracy for all.

Strong local organizations with a clear vision and an appetite for bold action are well able to scale up to win national victories when strategic opportunities present themselves. Last May, for example, the Home Defenders League, a project of LCCG and many close allies, staged a dramatic week of action which included civil disobedience by foreclosed homeowners at the Department of Justice as well as at other sites. Their actions tied together the simmering public outrage over the lack of prosecutions of Wall Street banks with a need to find relief for the hard hit families and communities. Five months later, reports of a pending $13 billion federal settlement with JPMorgan Chase suggest the long fight may be about to yield results.

The launch of the merged and expanded Center for Popular Democracy and Action for the Common Good is our ambitious move to help increase the strength, scale and reach of community organizing. Together, we are stronger. Together, we can build the power we need to win.

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