‘Inflation Dynamics’ With the Fed as Ringmaster
In the center ring, Federal Reserve brass will be gathering for the closed-door conference that is hosted annually by...
In the center ring, Federal Reserve brass will be gathering for the closed-door conference that is hosted annually by the Kansas City Fed. Janet Yellen is skipping the event, as chairs of the board of governors occasionally do. The town, though, will be full of her critics.
On the right, the American Principles Project will host a separate parley on the need to reform the monetary system by restoring the gold standard as the best route to full employment.
In the left ring, a third group, called Fed Up, will argue for placing a priority on job creation. The Washington Post reports that the organization’s “teach in” will cover “income inequality, efforts to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and whether the Fed should invest in municipal bonds.”
The Fed and its critics will be gathering as a bill to establish a Centennial Monetary Commission goes to the floor of the House. The bill would establish a commission to examine the Fed as it begins its second century.
At the Fed’s conference—the theme is “Inflation Dynamics”— one speaker will be the Fed’s vice chairman, Stanley Fischer. Earlier this month, in an interview with Bloomberg News, he seemed to suggest that the dollar wasn’t losing value fast enough for the Fed’s taste.
MarketWatch headlined the interview as suggesting that a rate hike in September is “not a done deal.” The collapse of stock markets around the world in recent days, says USA Today, gives the Fed a “new excuse” not to raise interest rates.
No doubt Fed Up, part of the Center for Popular Democracy, will make the most of it. In addition to pressing for keeping interest rates near zero, the group is lobbying for more labor and consumer advocates on boards of regional Federal Reserve banks. Fed Up also wants easy money. “Fed policy has been too tight for the past 40 years,” Fed Up Director Ady Barkan emails me. “The commitment to keeping inflation low at all costs is what has led to the elevated levels of unemployment.”
The focus of the American Principles Project—with its gathering of economists, political leaders, bloggers and activists— will be less on what the Fed should do and more on whether central banks are the problem and how Congress should use its powers for reform.
I wonder whether there might be surprising convergence between the left and right camps. American Principles is also focusing on employment but sees as critical to job creation the return to a dollar that is an honest unit of account defined in law and backed by gold.
One of the group’s presenters, Marc Miles, is likely to report on a new study showing that higher interest rates correlate to job creation. Has the Fed pursued the wrong policies as it has used its mandate, legislated in 1978 with the passage of the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act, to boost employment?
When the law created the Fed’s so-called dual mandate by obliging the central bank to aim for full employment in addition to maintaining price stability, even the New York Times called the measure a “cruel hoax.” Considering whether to end the dual mandate is one of the questions that would be taken up by the Centennial Monetary Commission on which the House is preparing to vote.
So would the question of whether a rules-based system, such as that proposed by economics professor John Taylor, could solve the problem of fiat money that is not defined in law. Congress has already started looking at these matters.
Fed Chair Yellen has bridled at such ideas. Earlier this year she suggested that she would oppose any rule of monetary policy making. At Jackson Hole three years ago, then-Chairman Ben Bernanke warned Congress to, as the Drudge Report headlined it, “butt out” of interest-rate policy discussions.
The fear at the Fed is that Congress will politicize the formation of monetary policy. That strikes me as a weak line. The Constitution, which all Fed chairmen swear to support, grants monetary powers to Congress, precisely to the most political branch of the government.
We are approaching the end of a presidency that has been hobbled by an underperforming economy. No wonder the Fed’s most celebrated annual gathering is now bracketed by competing conferences that seek political reform of monetary policy. The big question is whether Congress and the presidential candidates are listening.
Source: Wall Street Journal Asia
Small Business Hiring is Swinging Higher
CBS News - March 3, 2015, by Jonathan Berr - Want another sign of the economic rebound? Small-business hiring is on the...
CBS News - March 3, 2015, by Jonathan Berr - Want another sign of the economic rebound? Small-business hiring is on the rise.
The Paychex/IHS Small Business Job Index posted a 0.19 percent monthly increase in February, rising to 100.84. That follows January's 0.09 percent gain and marks the second straight month of advances. On a year-over-year basis, the index, which measures hiring at businesses with 50 or fewer workers, slipped 0.31 percent.
"Small businesses are off to a solid start in 2015 when it comes to job growth," said Martin Mucci, president and CEO of Paychex, in a press release. "While it's still early in the year, the first two months have seen consistent positive improvement."
Nationally, signs of increased small-business hiring abound. Only two regions that were measured in February showed a decline, and 13 of the 20 states analyzed have index levels topping 101. The Pacific Region had the best performance in February, while New England, which has gotten pounded this winter with record-setting snowfall, showed the worst one-month performance.
Indiana edged out Texas and Florida to become the leading state for small-business hiring, and Dallas led all metropolitan areas.
The index is calculated using aggregated small-business payroll data on 350,000 small businesses and with a base year of 2004 because it was a period of expansion before the start of the economic downturn. Although politicians often refer to small businesses as an engine of economic growth, economists have disputed this notion in recent years.
Nonetheless, the report does underscore positive job market trends. During 2014, 37 states and the District of Columbia showed statistically significant improvements in employment. Texas had the largest gains (457,900), followed by California (320,300) and Florida (230,600). The biggest job losses were in Minnesota (5,200), Idaho (1,700) and New Mexico (1,600). The strengthening continued in January, when the nation's overall unemployment rate slipped to 5.7 percent.
According to the Federal Reserve, economists believe the "long-run normal" unemployment rate would be between 5 percent and 6 percent over the next five to six years in the absence of "shocks."
Jobless rates for certain categories of workers, though, remain stubbornly high. Unemployment for Millennials, for instance, was 14 percent as of January. According to Fivethirtyeight.com, this generation is poorer than people their age were in 1989 because so many are deeply indebted with student loans and are less likely to own a house.
The national jobless rate for African-Americans was 10.3 percent in January. In the two-thirds of states for which data are available, the median real wages of African-Americans fell between 2000 and 2014, while pay for whites rose 2.5 percent during the same period. Two liberal think tanks, the Center for Popular Democracy and the Economic Policy Research Institute, argued in a report released today that these job-market disparities indicate the Federal Reserve should resist pressure to raise interest rates.
"America needs the Federal Reserve to concentrate on labor market stability and ensure that wages are rising with productivity, so that workers reap the benefits from their efficiencies and hard work; that means prioritizing a wage growth target, rather than inflation," the report said. "A Federal Reserve dominated by banks and major corporations will produce an economy that works for them, at the risk of leaving tens of millions of working families -- particularly Black working families -- with little hope of a better life."
Source
Secrecy Surrounds Half Billion Handout to Charters
The U.S. Department of Education is poised to spend half a billion dollars to help create new charter schools, while...
The U.S. Department of Education is poised to spend half a billion dollars to help create new charter schools, while the public is being kept in the dark about which states have applied for the lucrative grants, and what their actual track records are when it comes to preventing fraud and misuse.
Already the federal government has spent $3.3 billion in American tax dollars under the Charter Schools Program (CSP), as tallied by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).
But the government has done so without requiring any accountability from the states and schools that receive the money, as CMD revealed earlier this year.
Throwing good money after bad, Education Secretary Arne Duncan called for a 48 percent increase in federal charter funding earlier this year, and the House and Senate budget proposals also call for an increase—albeit a more modest one—while at the same time slashing education programs for immigrants and language learners.
The clamor for charter expansion comes despite the fact that there are federal probes underway into suspected waste and mismanagement within the program, not to mention ongoing and recently completed state audits of fraud perpetrated by charter school operators.
Earlier this year, the Center for Popular Democracy documented more than $200 million in fraud, waste, and mismanagement in the charter school industry in 15 states alone, a number that is likely to be just the tip of the iceberg.
Is now really the right time to plow more tax money into charters?
Insiders Deliberate Far from the Public Eye
The Department of Education is currently deciding what states to award $116 million this year, and more than half a billion during the five-year grant cycle.
So who is in the running and what are their track records?
Which states have applied for a grant designed to eviscerate the public school system in the name of “flexibility?” (CMD's review of state applications and reviewers' comments from the previous grant cycle exposed “flexibility” as a term of art used by the industry for state laws that allow charter schools to: operate independently from locally elected school boards, employ people to teach without adequate training or certification, and avoid collective bargaining that helps ensure that teacher-student ratios are good so that each kid gets the attention he or she deserves.)
There is no way of knowing.
The U.S Department of Education has repeatedly refused to honor a CMD request under the Freedom of Information Act for the grant applications, even though public information about which states have applied would not chill deliberation and might even help better assess which applicants should receive federal money.
The agency has even declined to provide a list with states that have applied:
“We cannot release a list of states that have applied while it is in the midst of competition."
The upshot of this reticence is that states will land grants—possibly to the tune of a hundred million dollars or more in some cases—all at the discretion of charter school interests contracted to evaluate the applications, but without any input from ordinary citizens and advocates concerned about public schools and troubled by charter school secrecy and fraud.
But, if people in a state know that a state is applying they can weigh in so that the agency is not just hearing from an applicant who wants the money, regardless of the history of fraud and waste in that state.
Charter Millions by Hook or by Crook: The Case of Ohio
Despite ED’s unwillingness to put all the cards on the table, state reports tell us that Ohio has once again applied for a grant under the program.
The state, whose lax-to-non-existing charter school laws are an embarrassment even to the industry, has previously been awarded at least $49 million in CSP money—money that went to schools overseen by a rightwing think-tank, and, more worryingly, to schools overseen by an authorizer that had its performance rating boosted this year by top education officials who removed the failing virtual schools from the statistics so as not to stop the flow of state and federal funds.
As The Plain Dealer put it in an exposé: “It turns out that Ohio’s grand plan to stop the national ridicule of its charter school system is giving overseers of many of the lowest-performing schools a pass from taking heat for some of their worst problems.”
Another component of this plan, it turns out, was to apply for more federal millions to the failing schools that—by a miraculous sleight of hand—are no longer failing.
The director of Ohio’s Office of Quality School Choice, David Hansen, fell on the sword and announced his resignation in June. But Democratic lawmakers suspect that this goes higher up in the chain of command, and have called on State Superintendent Richard Ross to resign.
Did the scrubbed statistics touting the success of Ohio’s charters find its way into the state application for federal millions, signed by Superintendent Ross?
What about other states, such as Indiana, with a similar history of doctoring data to turn failing charter schools into resounding success stories?
After Abysmal Results, States Re-apply for More Money
While the known unknowns are troubling, the known knowns—to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld—are also equally disturbing.
For example, Colorado applied for grant renewal this year.
But, the last time around, in 2010, the state landed a $46 million CSP grant thanks in no small part to the lax “hiring and firing” rules and the lack of certification requirements for charter school teachers--a reviewer contracted by the U.S. Department of Education to score the application noted.
Look at California.
Through meeting minutes from the California State Board of Education we also know that the Golden State submitted an application this year. In 2010, California was awarded $254 million over five years in CSP money, but as the Inspector General discovered in a 2012 audit, the state department of education did not adequately monitor any of the schools that received sub-grants. Some schools even received federal money “without ever opening to students.” A review by CMD revealed that a staggering 9 out of the 41 schools that shuttered in the 2014-'15 school year were created by federal money under CSP.
How about Wisconsin?
Wisconsin received $69.6 million between 2010 and 2015, but out of the charter schools awarded sub-grants during the first two years of the cycle, one-fifth (16 out of 85) have closed since, as CMD discovered.
Then there’s Indiana.
Indiana was awarded $31.3 million over the same period, partly because of the fact that charter schools in the state are exempt from democratic oversight by elected school boards. “[C]harter schools are accountable solely to authorizers under Indiana law,” one reviewer enthused, awarding the application 30/30 under the rubric “flexibility offered by state law.”
This “flexibility” has been a recipe for disaster in the Hoosier state with countless examples of schools pocketing the grant money and then converting to private schools, as CMD discovered by taking a closer look at grantees under the previous cycle:
The Indiana Cyber Charter School opened in 2012 with $420,000 in seed money from the federal program. Dogged by financial scandals and plummeting student results the charter was revoked in 2015 and the school last month leaving 1,100 students in the lurch.
Padua Academy lost its charter in 2014 and converted to a private religious school, but not before receiving $702,000 in federal seed money.
Have They Learned Anything?
Secretary Duncan has previously called for “absolute transparency” when it comes to school performance, but that’s just a talking point unless he releases the applications, or even a list of the states that are in the running, before they are given the final stamp of approval.
As it stands, there is no way of knowing if the state departments of education seeking millions in tax dollars:
Have supplied actual performance data that reflect the reality for students enrolled in charter schools rather than “scrubbed” or doctored numbers;
Try to outbid each other in “flexibility” by explaining, say, how charter schools in X can hire teachers without a license and fire them without cause. In its 2010 application, the Colorado Department of Education, for example, boasted of how charter school teachers are “employed at will by the school”;
Have corrective action plans so as to avoid repeating the costly waste and mistakes from the previous grant cycle (such as schools created by federal seed money closing within a few years or never even opening).
Because the federal charter schools program is designed to foster charter school growth, which in turn means that money will be diverted from traditional public schools to an industry that resists government enforcement of basic standards for financial controls, accountability, and democratic oversight, the public has a big stake in this and a right to know more, before their money disappears down black holes.
Source: PR Watch
Shutting Down the School-to-Prison Pipeline
Working at The Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), Kate has partnered with youth-led organizations on various policy...
Working at The Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), Kate has partnered with youth-led organizations on various policy initiatives and community organizing campaigns, and has represented young people facing school suspensions. At Proskauer, she has conducted trainings and served as a mentor and supervisor, enabling our lawyers to make a real difference in school suspension hearings. Even when a suspension cannot be avoided, an attorney may be able to help reduce its duration or secure other benefits, such as help for a learning disability, or a transfer to a school that is better-suited to the student.
Read the full article here.
On-call Shifts String Retail Workers Along
The Boston Globe - April 19, 2015, by Dante Ramos - Because life-threatening crises arise at odd times, people in some...
The Boston Globe - April 19, 2015, by Dante Ramos - Because life-threatening crises arise at odd times, people in some fields have days when they’re on call. EMTs get called to accident scenes. Doctors have patients who might fall ill or go into labor at any moment. But do unforeseen variations in sweater sales, or in foot traffic in the housewares department, have the same urgency? Of course not.
Recently, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sent letters demanding information from Gap, Abercrombie & Fitch, Urban Outfitters, and 10 other major retail chains about their use of on-call shifts — periods for which an employee must keep an open schedule but might not end up working.
Instead of simply reporting for work, the employee has to check in with a supervisor a few hours in advance. If she gets called in, she may have to scramble for a babysitter. If she doesn’t get called in, she doesn’t get paid, and it’s too late to get a shift on a second job. “People will be scheduled for eight on-call shifts in a pay period and only get called in for one shift,” says attorney Rachel Deutsch of the Center for Popular Democracy, a labor advocacy group.
Some of the retailers Schneiderman targeted have written the practice into their employee handbooks. Others, such as JC Penney, told reporters last week they have policies against it. Still others have responded cryptically to reporters’ inquires; TJX, the Massachusetts-based discount giant, told CNN Money that its schedules “serve the needs” of workers and the chain. I contacted the company to clarify, but it didn’t respond.
On-call shifts are a new frontier: They’ve proliferated at big chains because of just-in-time scheduling software, which uses up-to-the-minute data to maximize sales while minimizing the number of employees on the clock at slower times. Statistics are hard to come by, although a 2011 survey by Retail Action Project, another advocacy group, found that 43 percent of New York City retail workers were assigned to on-call shifts sometimes or often. Until Schneiderman’s office started sending out letters, the practice had attracted little regulatory attention. (In Massachusetts, the attorney general’s office is watching what happens in New York, but hasn’t taken similar action.)
Despite their relative novelty in retail, on-call shifts speak to an age-old tension. Economic life is full of uncertainty. How much should employers bear, and how much should fall on workers? Jon Hurst, president of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts, argues that stores face stiff competition from e-commerce and survive at the mercy of the customer who, he says, “moves on a dime.” He adds, “If you choose to work in retailing, you have to live with the consumer.”
In other sectors, though, people who work on call are often paid salaries that presume some unpredictability, or they’re paid for the time they spend waiting around. Deutsch used to work as a union rep for hospitals in the Bay Area. One hospital, she says, had a handful of technicians on staff who performed echocardiograms during the workday. After hours, there was a technician on call, who was paid half-time for those shifts even when there was no work.
A key difference: Echocardiogram techs have a specialized skill. Entry-level retail workers don’t, and those averse to on-call shifts are easily replaced.
Businesses aren’t social-service agencies. To rely on employers as guarantors of health care and retirement security, as the US government did after World War II, is to assume they and their workers want to be bound together intimately, for decades on end. But at the other extreme, companies that treat employee relationships as fleeting and transactional — the workplace equivalent of a one-night stand — will end up with lots of churn in their ranks.
Or they’ll be subject to lots of government mandates. Responding to a variety of complaints about unpredictable schedules, San Francisco last year approved a far-reaching “retail worker bill of rights” that, among other things, requires employers to post schedules weeks in advance. A proposed Massachusetts law has similar provisions. Hurst points out that parts of the bill would have hamstrung local retailers in February, when sales plunged during a four-week Ice Age.
Retail chains can forestall such rules by changing their ways. When stores train workers to do more than scan tags and say “I can help who’s next,” those workers can improvise. They might tend to customers during a sudden rush while prioritizing other jobs, like restocking shelves, at slower moments. If employers still believe they need on-call shifts, they can simply guarantee employees some pay for those periods. Ideally, chains would do so voluntarily. In practice, some will need a regulatory nudge.
When retailers can claim free options on hourly workers’ time, they have no incentive to make firm decisions in advance. But no one likes being strung along, and no one’s life is infinitely flexible.
Soure
De Blasio Administration Rejects Two Council Voter Registration Bills
Gotham Gazette - October 23, 2014, by Kristen Meriwether -In 2000 the City Council passed Local Law 29 which aimed to...
Gotham Gazette - October 23, 2014, by Kristen Meriwether -In 2000 the City Council passed Local Law 29 which aimed to increase voter registration by requiring 19 city agencies to offer voter registration forms to its customers. It's fourteen years after the law's passage and compliance has been abysmal.
A report compiled by Center for Popular Democracy released this week shows during their walk-ins to 14 of those city agencies, 95 percent of people were never asked if they wanted to register to vote. Of those who self-identified as citizens, the report indicated 84 percent were not given a voter registration form.
On Thursday the City Council held an oversight hearing to discuss the poor compliance and introduce two bills aimed to increase voter registration at the city agency level. Intro 493, sponsored by Committee on Government Operations chair Ben Kallos, would require 15 additional agencies to be covered under the agency-based voter registration law. Intro 356, sponsored by Council Member Jumaane Williams, would assign a code to each agency that would be printed on the voter registration forms and allow the City to track how many forms are being utilized from each agency.
Both bills are being rejected by the de Blasio administration.
"We are committed to getting agency-based voter registration right," Mindy Tarlow, director of the Mayor's Office of Operations, said during her testimony. "But to get it done, we are going to need time and space to manage the agencies and correct long-standing behavior."
Tarlow pointed to Directive 1, issued by Mayor Bill de Blasio on July 11, 2014. In the directive—his first as mayor—he ordered each agency covered under Local Law 29 to prepare a plan showing how they would implement the requirements of the Charter and submit it within 60 days.
The directive also requires each agency submit a semi-annual report on how the plan is being implemented which will include the number of voter registration forms distributed, the number of registration forms completed, and the number of forms transmitted to the Board of Elections.
Tarlow said she agrees with the assessment that there is a problem, but she argued that with the administration already addressing the problem, it was too early for further legislation.
"It is hard. We are trying to bring a number of agencies along," Tarlow said, adding that before moving on new legislation, "we want a chance to feel like we have made some inroads."
Tarlow did not provide an exact timeline as to when the Council would see the results from Directive 1, but did promise to share preliminary reports with the Council some time at the end of November. Kallos jokingly said he looked forward to to reading it in between bites of his Thanksgiving dinner.
"We need the flexibility to watch this over time," Henry Berger, special counsel to the mayor, said during the hearing.
Intro 356The administration's rejection of the second bill, Intro 356, is based less on Directive 1 and more on privacy concerns. Tarlow argued that by putting a code which would identify what agency a voter was getting services from may deter voters from registering at agencies.
"This is to protect the privacy of the individuals who receive services from government that they don't wish to be disclosed," Tarlow said in her testimony.
The council members now face the prospect of attempting to negotiate the bills with the administration.
On Thursday, Council Member Williams went through a lengthy back-and-forth with members of the administration as well as representatives of the Board of Elections (who testified in a later panel) to dispute objections. Williams argued there was already a code (the number 9) on all voter registration forms coming from City agencies and a separate code for those coming from CUNY.
Both Williams and Kallos asked if it was a matter of that information being released to the public or simply being documented. Tarlow said it wasn't a matter of determining who the person was, but what services they were seeking or receiving. She said the administration believes the fear of that information getting out would deter people from signing up to register to vote.
Williams pointed out information such as social security numbers, fax numbers, and driver's license numbers are all exempt from public reporting, but records are still kept. He argued this code could be exempt as well.
Michael Ryan, executive director of the New York City Board of Elections (BOE), said during his testimony the BOE did not believe this code could be exempt based on current law, but he admitted they did not have a chance to dive in deeply on the issue because they were preparing for the upcoming election.
"I don't know that I have been persuaded," Williams said.
Source
Seattle Officials Repeal Tax That Upset Amazon
“From coast to coast, people lose their homes and get displaced from their communities even as the biggest corporations...
“From coast to coast, people lose their homes and get displaced from their communities even as the biggest corporations earn record profits and development booms,” said Sarah Johnson, director of Local Progress, a national association of progressive elected municipal officials. “Elected officials across the country are paying close attention to how Amazon and other corporations have responded to Seattle’s efforts to confront their affordable housing and homelessness crisis.”
Scarlett Johansson and Her Fellow Avengers Raise $500,000 for Puerto Rico Relief
Scarlett Johansson and Her Fellow Avengers Raise $500,000 for Puerto Rico Relief
Johansson and the John Gore Organization partnered for a benefit performance of Our Town in Atlanta....
Johansson and the John Gore Organization partnered for a benefit performance of Our Town in Atlanta.
Read the full article here.
Latinos Have The Highest Mortality Rate In Accidents Of The New York Construction Industry
Latinos Post - February 26, 2014, by Jorge Calvillo - The Hispanic and immigrant population employed in the...
Latinos Post - February 26, 2014, by Jorge Calvillo - The Hispanic and immigrant population employed in the construction industry in the state of New York is the ethnic group most vulnerable to fatal accidents in the workplace, according to a report by the Center for Popular Democracy.
According to El Diario NY, the data collected by the study shows that between 2003 and 2011, within the total amount of deaths by falls and accidents in construction areas registered in New York City, 60 percent of the deceased were Hispanic and/or immigrants.
This is an alarming figure because 75 construction workers die due to accidents per year in the state of New York, revealed journalist Blanca Rosa Vílchez, for news network Univisión.
The source points out that in New York, 41 percent of construction workers are Hispanic. However, the report released on Thursday showed that 74 percent of the deaths by accidents belong to that same ethnic group.
Last September 24, construction workers in Brooklyn protested to demand better safety conditions in their workplaces, after they reported a significant rise in accidents related to the low investment in safety that companies offer, which has caused severe accidents which in many cases have taken the lives of workers, who receive a minimum salary.
Back then, El Diario NY reported that the workers protested at 227 Carlton Avenue in Fort Greene, where a 62-year-old worker lost his life when the roof of one of the buildings he was working on collapsed onto him on September 10.
According to the protestors, contractor companies in New York buy low-quality materials to save some money and don't invest in safety courses for their workers, which leaves construction workers in a perilous situation.
The Latino community working in the construction industry is double vulnerable in this situation, since many of the workers are undocumented immigrants, and if they suffer an accident, they don't report the construction company for fear of being deported or fired.
As if this were not enough, if violations of safety norms are reported, the fines against construction companies are very low, which makes it easy for them to continue ignoring safety norms in construction sites.
Univisión highlights that the fines construction companies face are no higher than $2,000 in case of an accident, and $12,000 if a worker dies, a figure that reflects the dimensions of the risks that construction workers must face every day.
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Six retailers agree to end on-call scheduling: AG Schneiderman
Six retailers agree to end on-call scheduling: AG Schneiderman
Six national retailers will cease to use on-call scheduling methods for employees nationwide following a multistate...
Six national retailers will cease to use on-call scheduling methods for employees nationwide following a multistate investigation, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced in a press release Tuesday.
Aeropostale, Carter’s, David’s Tea, Disney, PacSun, and Zumiez were approached by attorney generals in eight states and the District of Columbia regarding the scheduling practice, which requires employees to contact the employer to know if they are to work a scheduled shift. Companies using this scheduling method often ask employees to call only one to two hours before a shift would begin, creating an unpredictable work schedule, according to a written statement from Schneiderman’s office.
The inquiry, which was sent to 15 retailers in April 2016, said the nature of on-call scheduling negatively impacts workers. Employees at these retailers may have difficulty making arrangements for childcare and elder-care and pursuing higher education, according to the letter. The letter also states employees subjected to on-call scheduling “in general experience higher incidences of adverse health effects, overall stress, and strain on family life” than workers who know their schedule in advance.
“People should not have to keep the day open, arrange for child care, and give up other opportunities without being compensated for their time,” Schneiderman said in a written statement.
Nearly 50,000 employees of the six retailers nationwide will be affected by the agreement.
“We are especially glad that employers like Disney and Carter’s, whose brands promote putting families first, will stop using on-call shifts that are notorious for wreaking havoc on families’ balance and puts undue stress on children,” Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy, said in a written statement.
Of the 15 retailers that received the inquiry letter regarding on-call shift scheduling, nine said they did not use on-call scheduling or had recently ceased doing so.
Employers in New York State are required to pay any employee who is either called into work or requests to work same-day to be scheduled “for at least four hours, or the amount of hours in a regularly scheduled shift, whichever is less, at the basic minimum hourly wage.”
Schneiderman sent a similar letter of inquiry in 2015 requesting retailers to end on-call scheduling. Of those, Abercrombie & Fitch, Gap, J. Crew, Urban Outfitters, Pier 1 Imports, and L Brands – the parent company of Bath & Body Works and Victoria’s Secret – were among the companies who agreed to end on-call scheduling.
By Jenna Macri
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2 months ago
2 months ago