CPD IN THE NEWS

Bloomberg News - August 22, 2014, by Jeff Kearns, Simon Kennedy and Michael McKee - Divisions within the Federal Reserve over how long to keep easy monetary policy are already in evidence in Wyoming as investors prepare for Chair Janet Yellen’s keynote speech.

Fed Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard told Bloomberg Radio that the U.S. central bank may begin tightening monetary policy earlier than officials previously expected.

“The evidence is leading toward an earlier increase than would have been in the works earlier this year,” said Bullard. “Labor markets have improved quite a bit relative to what the committee was thinking.”

Bullard spoke after Kansas City Fed President Esther George told Bloomberg Television that broad-based employment gains suggest the U.S. economy is strong enough to withstand higher interest rates. Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser, who voted against the Fed’s policy statement last month, told CNBC he’s concerned about the Fed not adjusting policy appropriately.

By contrast, Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart urged more patience, warning in a separate interview with Bloomberg Radio against “moving prematurely and snuffing out some progress.”

* * *

Robots don’t steal jobs, the U.S. labor market is less flexible than it was and workers haven’t suffered unprecedented periods out of work.

Photographer: Bradly Boner/Bloomberg

Fed Chair Janet Yellen arrived at the dinner to be greeted by about 10 people wearing bright green T-shirts emblazoned with “What Recovery?” and carrying placards with labor market data. Close

Those are among the conclusions of papers being presented at the symposium. Here is a review of their contents, which can be read in full on the Kansas City Fed’s website.

Robots and computers don’t steal as many jobs as some believe, and automation actually benefits many workers, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor David Autor said in his paper.

A key reason humans aren’t obsolete yet is that simple tasks such as visually identifying a chair, which any child can do, aren’t so easy for engineers to teach to computers, Autor said.

“Journalists and expert commentators overstate the extent of machine substitution for human labor and ignore the strong complementarities that increase productivity, raise earnings, and augment demand for skilled labor,” he wrote. “Challenges to substituting machines for workers in tasks requiring flexibility, judgment, and common sense remain immense.”

* * *

The U.S. labor market became less fluid in recent decades partly because of an aging workforce, a shift to older businesses, and the spread of occupational licensing and certification, economists Steven J. Davis and John Haltiwanger wrote in their paper.

The economists define labor market fluidity as “flows of jobs and workers across employers.” The paper found the U.S. “underwent a large, broad-based decline in the pace of labor market flows in recent decades.”

“An aging workforce is a factor behind the slowdown of worker reallocation,” the paper said.

* * *

U.S. workers in the aftermath of the 2007-2009 recession haven’t experienced unprecedentedly long bouts of non-employment, according to a paper by economists Jae Song and Till von Wachter.

Their findings “suggest that the potential for hysteresis in the aftermath of the Great Recession is moderate,” the paper said. Hysteresis posits that people out of work for too long have a harder time finding work, leading to a persistent decline in the employment-to-population rate

* * *

Policy makers would benefit from a better understanding of labor markets, economist Giuseppe Bertola argued in a paper that weighed the impact of rules making those markets rigid or flexible.

Rules that protect workers from job losses and provide more generous unemployment benefits can soften and smooth shocks to the economy, said Bertola.

* * *

George opened the symposium late yesterday by putting the presenters on the spot.

The last conference devoted to labor markets was 20 years ago, George told the group of almost 200 as they ate steak and salmon dinners beneath elk antler chandeliers.

The presenters and discussants back then included five future Nobel Prize winners and two academics who would go on to be central bankers: Bank of England Deputy Governor Charles Bean and Stanley Fischer, the Bank of Israel governor who became Fed vice chairman in June. Fischer sat at one of the front tables last night.

“So for those of you that will be on the program,” George said to laughter, “We’re either setting you up for a blessing or a curse.”

This year’s topic is “Re-Inventing Labor Market Dynamics.” In 1994 it was “Reducing Unemployment: Current Issues and Policy Options.”

George said she went through the 1994 proceedings only to find central bankers and economists are still grappling with some of the same basic issues today.

“I saw that the discussion included things like the decline in demand for low-skilled workers due to technology and the challenge of the long-term unemployment,” George said. “And questions were raised by that symposium, as they are today, about the usefulness of the unemployment rate as a measure of economic slack.”

It reads like a list of the most vexing issues the Fed faces now and will be attempting to tackle today and tomorrow.

* * *

Fed Chair Janet Yellen arrived at the dinner to be greeted by about 10 people wearing bright green T-shirts emblazoned with “What Recovery?” and carrying placards with labor market data.

The protesters had traveled to Wyoming to highlight the plight of “struggling workers from around the country” who want the Fed to pursue “full employment that reduces poverty and expands the middle class,” according to the Center for Popular Democracy, a Brooklyn-based organization. The backs of their T-shirts had a graph comparing the performance of wage growth among the top 1 percent and the rest.

Ady Barkan, a staff attorney with the group, spoke briefly with Yellen at the door of the lodge’s Explorers Room. “She said she understands the issues we’re talking about and is doing everything they can,” he said, after she had entered the room.

Yellen has regularly cited weak labor markets as a scourge of the economy she’s trying to boost with easy monetary policy.

Shemethia Butler, who works part time at a McDonald’s Corp. restaurant in Washington, was one of those to make the trip. The 34-year-old said that while she isn’t up on monetary policy, she wants policy makers to know she fears higher interest rates for her and her community. She said she works 25 to 35 hours a week for $9.50 an hour at a job she’s had for just over a year. Before that she was unemployed for two years.

“There’s no recovery,” Butler said. “The economy is broken because there aren’t enough jobs for people like me.”

* * *

Yellen’s speech will be the main event of the first full day of the conference. She will speak at 8 a.m. Mountain Time today.

Her address will be followed by the presentation of the paper by Davis and Haltiwanger.

Autor will then discuss job polarization before a panel on demographics featuring Karen Eggleston of Stanford University, David Lam of the University of Michigan and Ronald Lee of the University of California, Berkeley.

European Central Bank President Mario Draghi will deliver the keynote luncheon speech.

Tomorrow, Von Wachter and then Bertola will present their papers.

The final panel will provide an overview of labor markets and monetary policy. It will include Bank of England Deputy Governor Ben Broadbent, Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda and Brazilian central bank chief Alexandre Tombini.

* * *

The conference is lacking Wall Street participants for the first time.

An exception is Jacob Frenkel, chairman of JPMorgan Chase International, who is attending in his capacity of chairman of the board of trustees of the Group of 30, a private-sector group of mainly former policy makers which advises central banks and governments. Tim Adams, president of the Institute of International Finance, is also present.

Draghi, Kuroda and Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz provide international central banking firepower.

Among academics in attendance are Alan Blinder of Princeton University, Harvard University’s Kenneth Rogoff and Martin Feldstein, and John Taylor of Stanford University. President Barack Obama’s administration is represented by Jason Furman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and Jeffrey Zients, director of the National Economic Council.

* * *

The backdrop for the symposium and Yellen’s speech was set by the release of the minutes from the Federal Open Market Committee’s July discussions.

Fed officials in July raised the possibility they might raise rates sooner than anticipated, as they neared agreement on an exit strategy. Some participants were “increasingly uncomfortable” with the pledge to keep interest rates low for a “considerable period,” the minutes said.

At the same time, “many participants” still saw “a larger gap between current labor market conditions and those consistent with their assessments of normal levels of labor utilization.”

* * *

* * *

Some recent stories on the U.S. labor market:

* * *

The opening day of Jackson Hole has been associated with stock-market gains in each of the past seven years. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index rose an average 1.3 percent on each of them from 2007 to 2012, following speeches by then-Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, who skipped last year’s conference.

The biggest climb was the 1.9 percent of 2009, when Bernanke said the economy appeared to be “leveling out.” Gains also followed his signals of 2010 and 2012 that fresh asset-purchases were imminent.

The bar is therefore set high for Yellen who identifies slack labor markets as a reason for easy monetary policy. Economist Ed Yardeni says the “Fairy Godmother of the Bull Market” won’t let us down.

Still, Steven Englander of Citigroup Inc. says that because “dovishness is increasingly anticipated,” Yellen may have to intensify her support for low interest rates if risk-assets such as stocks are to rally anew.

Source

New York Times – November 6, 2013, by Kirk Semple -

At about 1:15 p.m. on Wednesday, Maximino Leyva Ortiz, wearing an orange jumpsuit, his wrists shackled, stood before a judge in an immigration courtroom in Lower Manhattan, a lawyer at his side. The federal government was seeking to deport him.

He took an oath, lawyers’ identities were confirmed, and then Mr. Leyva told the judge he would not fight the order; he was prepared to be deported.

“You’re doing so voluntarily, sir?” Judge Brigitte Laforest asked.

Within minutes the hearing was over and Mr. Leyva was being led out of the courtroom by a bailiff; he was on his way back to Mexico.

The proceedings were quick and subdued. But the banality of the scene belied its significance. Mr. Leyva was the first client in a new program that seeks to provide public defenders for all poor immigrants residing in New York who have been detained and are facing deportation. The initiative is the first of its kind in the country.

Unlike in the nation’s criminal court system, defendants in immigration court have no constitutional right to a court-appointed lawyer. Fear and ignorance conspire with language barriers and poverty to keep detainees from securing legal counsel.

The new initiative, called the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, emerged from several years of study and lobbying among immigration lawyers and immigrants’ advocates. They were concerned that the absence of competent legal representation for many of New York’s immigrant detainees was resulting in unnecessary deportations that ruptured families and put an undue financial burden on government.

Last summer, the New York City Council allocated $500,000 to help pay for a pilot program to test the viability of the initiative. The project’s organizers said that money, plus a supplementary contribution from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, would allow them to provide representation to 190 immigrants.

“At its core, it’s a justice issue,” said Peter L. Markowitz, a professor at Cardozo who helped lead the initiative. “Most excitingly, it’s a chance to mark a sea change in the treatment of immigrants in this country.”

The organizations behind the project are the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic at Cardozo Law School, the Center for Popular Democracy, the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights, the Vera Institute of Justice and Make the Road New York. They are ultimately seeking to provide representation for all indigent immigrants living in New York who have been detained and are facing deportation in immigration courts in New York City; Batavia, N.Y.; Newark; and Elizabeth, N.J. — an annual population of about 2,450.

Full funding would cost about $7.4 million per year, proponents said. But in a report to be released on Thursday, the advocates argue that by shortening detentions and reducing deportations, the full-blown program would save governments and private employers an estimated $5.9 million a year.

Though the pilot project opened on Wednesday with a deportation, Mr. Markowitz, who watched the proceedings from the gallery of the small, windowless courtroom, said the benefits of the program were immediately evident. Mr. Leyva had no legal relief from deportation, Mr. Markowitz explained, and to prolong his case would have meant postponing the inevitable, at great cost to the government and to Mr. Leyva.

“He didn’t spend needless time in detention,” Mr. Markowitz said.

By the end of the afternoon, 10 detainees had faced the court accompanied by lawyers from Bronx Defenders and Brooklyn Defender Services, which are providing legal counsel for detainees in the pilot program.

The efficiency of the hearings involving public defenders stood in sharp contrast to the first case on the docket. The detainee, Lewis Spencer Taveras-Mejia, was not included in the pilot project because his family had retained a lawyer for him.

But the lawyer failed to show up for the hearing.

“They told me that they hired a lawyer and that she would be here today,” Mr. Taveras-Mejia told the judge. He said he had never met the lawyer or learned her name, and then he began to cry. The judge decided to schedule a new hearing for Nov. 19.

“That’s 13 days of detention that the taxpayers have to pay for and that he’s unnecessarily spending in jail,” Mr. Markowitz said. He tapped on his phone, calculating the extra detention cost: $2,067.

Source

 

Retailers have been under intense pressure from labor groups, regulators, and their own employees to end on-call scheduling—the practice in which shift workers are called to work on short notice, and are often uncompensated if it turns out to be a slow day. On Friday, New York attorney-general Eric Schneiderman’s office announced that J.Crew will end on-call scheduling nationwide this month. The retailer joins Urban Outfitters, Abercrombie & Fitch, Bath & Body Works, Gap, and Victoria’s Secret, which all have announced changes since Schneiderman’s office launched an inquiry into the practice at over a dozen companies.

“After discussion with my office, J. Crew has agreed to end on-call shifts nationwide and to provide one week of advance notice about schedules to employees at all New York store locations,” said Schneiderman in a statement. “Workers deserve protections that allow them to have a reliable schedule in order to arrange for transportation to work, to accommodate child-care needs, and to budget their family finances.”

This is the sixth agreement Schneiderman has reached with a major retailer. In April, the New York attorney-general’s office sent letters to 13 retailers asking for information regarding their scheduling policies: “We have been informed that a number of companies in New York State utilize on-call shifts and require employees to report in some manner, whether by phone, text message, or email, before the designated shift in order to learn whether their services are ultimately needed on-site that day,” said the letter.

The letter expresses concern that the practice might be in violation of a state regulation that employees who report for work must be paid for at least four hours (or the number of hours in a regular shift) of work. It cites the financial and personal strains for workers without predictable schedules—from being unable to work another job or attend school, to the strains of finding childcare last minute. Further, a report by the Economic Policy Institute found that the lowest income workers face the most irregular work schedules.

A spokesperson for Gap Inc. confirmed that all five brands—The Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy, Intermix, and Athleta—has phased out on-call scheduling globally by the end of September.* L Brand—the parent company for Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works—also confirmed that they have ended the practice nationwide.

Gap is also working on a pilot project with Joan Williams, a professor and director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California Hastings College of Law, and Susan Lambert, a professor at the University of Chicago who studies scheduling issues, on new ways to stabilize worker schedules. Lambert’s researchfound that 64 percent of food-service workers and half of retail workers receive less than a week’s notice for shifts.

For now, the shift away from on-call scheduling seems to be only gaining momentum: Earlier this week, Forever 21 was hit with a lawsuit from a former employee over unpaid on-call scheduling. And, for the seven remaining companies that Schneiderman’s office contacted (the identities of which are unknown), such momentum may soon be overpowering.

Source: The Atlantic

Last month I returned to my native Puerto Rico to attend a wedding and was catching up with family still on the Island one evening. A couple of sips of whiskey in, and the truth came out: My wife’s father reported that he hadn’t received a paycheck in 3 months.

He is a doctor. A highly specialized one, And, with most of his patients coming through government insurance, he hadn’t seen a dime in payment.

Most Puerto Rican health care professionals try to hang on as long as possible. They want to stay in their homeland, be with their families and help make things better. But increasingly, they have no choice. Now many doctors are among the hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans who have become economic migrants,  forced to flee  from home because they simply cannot survive on patriotism and hope.

In 2014, 364 doctors left the island,  the Puerto Rican Surgeons and Physicians Association reported. Last year, 500 practitioners packed up and got out.

“Don’t get hurt on a Sunday or a holiday,” one man recently told CNN after his uncle died because only 2 neurologists were on duty to serve the island’s 3.5 million “forgotten citizens.” (His family now calls the lines at the hospital “the walking dead.”)

Behind those staggering numbers is rapacious, hungry, heartless greed as embodied by two simple words: Hedge funds.

Just like Detroit, Greece and other places rocked by the recession and government mismanagement, Puerto Rico’s debt ballooned over the last decade, further exacerbated by colonial status and expiring tax incentives.

In 2012, hedge fund managers began to circle the Commonwealth, looking to reap billions – and experiment with new wealth extraction strategies that could be imported back to the American mainland. The short version: They bought Puerto Rican bonds after the price fell.

Now these “vulture” managers (as they are literally called for their creditor and distressed buying schemes – los buitres in Spanish) insist that any package from Washington that allows Puerto Rico to renegotiate its $72 billion debt puts Wall Street investors at the front of the line to get paid.

A handful are holding out for even more; refusing to accept any restructuring and demanding even more severe austerity measures and suffering so they don’t have to take any losses on their risky investment.

These carrion feeders are in fact, real human beings, acting in inhumane ways: Mark Brodsky, of the $4.5 billion Aurelius Capital and Andrew Feldstein, of the $20 billion BlueMountain Capital are two leaders of the vulture flock of hedge fund billionaires circling Puerto Rico trying to make huge profits from what’s turning into a full-scale humanitarian crisis.

Brodsky bought up the Island’s debt for as low as 29 cents on the dollar and now is demanding full repayment (Think Greece, and Argentina). He is helping fund economists who argue that vital government services must cease – and schools and hospitals must close -  to extract full payment.

Feldstein has teams of lawyers fighting basic protections for Puerto Ricans in court and lobbyists taking the same case to Congress.  On his dime they have launched a high profile and highly fraudulent media campaign to make sure Congress keeps working for the billionaires – and against teachers, students, the elderly… and my former neighbors and relatives.

Together with John Paulson – who literally bragged to his bros that together they could create the “Singapore of the Caribbean” and create a tax haven for themselves – these vulture investors are consuming the living, for their greed.

That’s why I’ve been working with Brave New Films and a large coalition, including Make the Road, New York Communities for Change, Organize NOW, Florida Institute for Reform & Empowerment, AFT, SEIU, NEA, New Jersey Communities United, Grassroots Collaborative , Center for Popular Democracy, Strong Economy for All, and Citizen Action, under the campaign banner Hedge Clippers, to help ordinary Puerto Ricans expose the truth about these bad actors and their flock.

Preying on Puerto Rico: Forgotten Citizens of Hedge Fund Island is a series of short film videos that Puerto Rican activists helped create to kick off an escalated series of large actions calling on those with the power to help to stand up for Puerto Ricans and stand up to los buitres.

These same leaders are behind a growing wave of protests on Capitol Hill, Wall Street, the Trump Towers and at the Federal Reserve Board offices in cities across the U.S.

They are getting attention and being heard, but the path forward is uphill. We need your help. With unemployment at 14% and 45 percent of Puerto Ricans living below the poverty line Puerto Rico is in a humanitarian crisis. PROMESA, the bill that just passed out of the US House and is on its way to the Senate, is a bad deal that will help the hedge funds, but not the Puerto Rican people.

Preying on Puerto Rico: Forgotten Citizens of HedgeFund Island is only the beginning of how we can use our voices and votes to help my father in-law remain on the Island to help save lives – and end this suffering caused by these vultures and the politicians that do their bidding.  

Join us today to share these films – and call Feldstein and Brodsky to ask them: how many more billions do you need to make before you stop pillaging the poor?

By Julio López Varona / Brave New Films

Source