CPD IN THE NEWS

Bring Me the News - March 5, 2015, by Adam Uren - Minnesota has the third-highest unemployment gap between white and black people in the country – with the jobless rate among blacks almost four times higher than among whites.

The figures come from a new study by the Center for Popular Democracy, which shows that the unemployment rate in Minnesota among black resident is 3.7 times higher compared to white people.

This is second only to the District of Columbia (5.6 times) and Wisconsin (4.6 times).

The gap in Minnesota has lessened since 2007 however, when 3.85 times

It also found that the jobless rate among Hispanic people is more than two times greater than for white people.

A rally will be held Thursday, WCCO reports, which will “draw attention to the racial differences between wages and jobs available” in the Twin Cities and Minnesota as a whole.

It is being organized by representatives of Neighborhoods Organizing for Change (NOC), the Center for Popular Democracy and the Economy Policy Institute, and held at the NOC offices in W. Broadway Ave., Minneapolis, starting at 3 p.m.

The significant disparity between black and white unemployment remains, even though overall unemployment has dropped in recent years thanks to the recovery of Minnesota’s economy since the financial crisis.

The unemployment rate among black people across the state fell to 11.9 percent in 2014, compared to 15.4 per cent in 2007.

However, the rate among white people stood at just 3.2 percent in 2014, down from 4 percent in 2007. The report also found that the unemployment rate among Hispanics stood at 7 percent in 2014, almost the same as it was in 2007.

The unemployment gap is even worse in the metro area, with the graph above showing that the black unemployment rate is 3.89 times higher than white.

The report features a case study of 23-year-old Minneapolis resident Tyrone Raino, who told the Center for Popular Democracy the only full-time job he could find is 40 minutes outside the city, and he works there 40 hours a week while taking a further 20 hours of classes every week.

Minnesota regularly features among the worst states for racial unemployment gaps.

In 2013, Minnesota was second only to Wyoming according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Star Tribune reports, when the black unemployment rate was triple the white rate.

And in 2011, MPR reported on a study by the Economic Policy Institute, which found the Twin Cities along with Memphis had the biggest white-black unemployment gaps out of the nation’s 50 biggest metropolitan areas.

When The Atlantic ran a piece last month lauding the metro area for its winning mix of affordability, opportunity and wealth, several publications responded by highlighting the gaps that suggest not everything is rosy in the Twin Cities.

It’s not just with unemployment either. WalletHub found Minnesota has the second-worst wealth gap between white people and people of color in the United States, as well as one of the biggest gaps for home ownership levels.

Source

Starbucks officials asked store managers to "go the extra mile" to improve employee scheduling in the aftermath of a scathing report issued by an advocacy group this week.

The nonprofit Center for Popular Democracy alleged that the company largely failed to deliver on its promises to alter scheduling practices in 2014.

More than a year ago, a New York Times report chronicled the havoc wreaked on Starbucks' baristas by its sophisticated scheduling technology.

In response, the coffeehouse giant vowed to establish more consistent hours, provide more notice regarding schedules and prevent workers who close stores from having to reopen again just hours later.

According to the CPD report, however, nearly half of 200 employees surveyed reported receiving schedules with one week or less of notice.

Employees also said that although schedules generally followed the previous week's pattern, dramatic fluctuations could happen in any week.

One in four respondents, meanwhile, said that either they or their coworkers still were scheduled to "clopen" stores.

"Many Starbucks scheduling policies fail to reflect the company’s human-focused values, while other policies designed to promote sustainable schedules have been implemented inconsistently," the group wrote in the report.

Company spokeswoman Jamie Riley told the Times this week that the CPD report "doesn’t align with what we’re seeing," but that the company is "the first to admit we have work to do."

Meanwhile, Cliff Burrows, Starbucks’ U.S. chief, responded with a memo to store managers calling for a "consistent schedule — free of back-to-back close and open shifts that are less than 8 hours apart — that is posted 2 weeks in advance."

Source: Manufacturing.net

Trump won by over 20 points, the Democrat leads in fundraising as well, aided in part by Ady Barkan, a wealthy Democratic activist with the Center for Popular Democracy who was recently diagnosed with A.L.S. (Lou Gehrig’s Disease). In speaking with Bill Roe, the First Vice Chair of the Arizona Democratic Party, he indicated that this race is unpredictable for several reasons.

Read the full article here.

As a general principle, the Fed should not react to short-term movements in the financial markets. For one thing, the labor market is much more important to the lives of most Americans, and it is more relevant to the Fed’s mandate of securing maximum employment with inflation stability.

Then consider this: More than 80% of stock wealth in the U.S. is owned by the wealthiest 10% of Americans, and more than half of Americans own no stocks at all (either directly or through retirement or other accounts). In short, movements in the stock markets do not have much effect on the spending power of most U.S. households. That means that movements in the stock markets–especially short-term volatility that is likely to largely dissipate–provides little information about the overall state of economic health.

On the other hand, the labor market provides the vast majority of income to the vast majority of Americans. The middle fifth of households, for example, gets more than 80% of household income directly from the labor market (either cash wages or employer-provided benefits). Further, many additional sources of income such as pensions, Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance, or the Earned Income Tax Credit hinge on participation in the labor market. That’s why trends in the labor market are crucial to assessing the overall state of the economy–which is far from fully recovered from the Great Recession.

The clearest remaining weakness is wages. The current pace of hourly wage growth is roughly 2% to 2.5%. A healthy labor market that met the Fed’s overall price inflation target should be churning out wage increases of at least 3.5%. Further, a period of wage growth well above this is necessary for workers’ pay to reclaim some of the ground lost to corporate profits earlier in this recovery. Until wage growth starts moving durably toward the healthy 3.5% target, it’s too early for the Fed to begin raising rates.

This labor-market-based reasoning for keeping rates low should weigh much more heavily on Fed calculations about interest rates than recent stock activity. The only caveat: if one of the root causes of recent stock market declines–the slowdown in the Chinese economy–provides a new potential headwind to U.S. growth going forward.

But the case for keeping rates unchanged in September was dispositive last week, even before large declines in the stock markets. And any strong stock rally in the coming month shouldn’t  make Fed officials feel fine about raising rates.

Source: Wall Street Journal