CPD IN THE NEWS

Al Jazeera - 05-12-2015 - Irregular hours and just-in-time scheduling are pervasive throughout the low-wage economy, but they do particular harm to working women, according to an analysis released Tuesday by the Center for Popular Democracy.

Women still disproportionately shoulder responsibility for child care and other family obligations, and more than 6 million women have cited those constraints as the primary reasons they are not employed full time, according to the report.

The Center for Popular Democracy argues that juggling family responsibilities with the unsteady work hours that often come with part-time employment leads to additional challenges for women.

“Women working more hours are likely to experience the stressful effects of overwork and may often have no choice but to work overtime hours or lose their job,” the report says. “However, the over 12 million women working part time in hourly jobs are at greatest risk of both highly erratic schedules and of extreme income fluctuation."

Women were found to be slightly more likely to work jobs paid on an hourly basis: 61 percent compared with 56 percent of men. As a result, their income is more likely to fluctuate based on how many hours they are assigned to work per week or month. Additionally, their off time can be difficult to control or predict because of last-minute scheduling.

Erratic hours can be particularly hard on women, who tend to spend more time than men performing household chores and caring for children. A 2014 Bureau of Labor Statistics survey found women in households with children under the age of 6 spent roughly an hour a day attending to their physical needs, whereas men spent roughly half an hour.

On a conference call with reporters to discuss the report, Albuquerque, New Mexico, activist Kris Buchmann said she has been “treated like my life outside of work didn’t matter” while working hourly jobs in retail. 

“I can’t tell you how many times I was asked to close and then turn around and come back in after five or six hours off,” she said. “It’s not enough for a full night’s sleep or showering or anything else I have to do."

Other times, “they would call me into work, I would show up, and they would say, ‘Oh, never mind. We don’t need you,’” she said. Such unpredictability made it difficult for her to know when she would need to find child care for her son.

University of Massachusetts at Amherst sociologist Naomi Gerstel, who wrote the book “Unequal Time: Gender, Class and Family in Employment Schedules” with Dan Clawson, said erratic scheduling exists “across the entire class spectrum” but falls especially hard on low-wage workers.

If you’re in a stable, full-time position, “you’re more likely to be able to say no or find substitutes” such as baby sitters and other care workers, she said. Additionally, some higher-paying workplaces are “changing occupations to make it possible for especially women workers to take on what’s defined as flexibility."

But perks such as maternity leave have not filtered down the income ladder. And long-term changes in family structure have created a “double-edged sword” for some workers, said Gerstel. Births to unmarried women have risen steadily since the 1940s, according the U.S. Census Bureau, so more single mothers have been forced to negotiate child care on top of their work schedules.

That’s beginning to change in some parts of the country. Carrie Gleason, the Center for Popular Democracy’s Fair Workweek Initiative director, told reporters on a conference call that 11 states “have introduced some form of work hours legislation, and this is an issue that was basically not on the map last year.”

Buchmann is part of a campaign to get predictable scheduling legislation passed in New Mexico. In November, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors approved a legislative package known as the Retail Worker Bill of Rights, which is, in part, intended to enforce more predictable scheduling for retail workers.

Source: Al Jazeera

“Historically, Toys “R” Us has offered generous severance to workers, which is part of why it should be forced to offer payments to workers now," said Carrie Gleason, campaign manager for the worker advocacy group Rise Up Retail. That group helped organize a petition calling for Bain, KKR, and Vornado to give the $470 million they had received in interest and fees from the retailer over the years to employees that were let go after the company foundered. KKR told Congress earlier this month it was seeking a way to help former Toys “R” Us employees outside of bankruptcy.

Read the full article here.

US News & World Report - November 13, 2014, by Katherine Peralta - Building on momentum from earlier this year, a group of policy advocates, economists and community organizations is calling for more transparency at the Federal Reserve, imploring that the Fed consider the plight of many who haven’t enjoyed the kind of recovery that recent positive economic data suggest.

The push for more access to the Fed is gaining momentum among the public and in Congress, though revamping a decades-old central banking system that’s helped stabilize the economy through multiple crises is not without controversy.

As two of the Fed’s most vocal critics of its current monetary policy near their retirement at the beginning of next year, a coalition called “Fed Up” is asking that the public have more say in the process of appointing their replacements and future Fed leaders. Members sent letters outlining their concerns to the Fed and will meet Friday with Fed Chair Janet Yellen in the District of Columbia.

As it progresses toward its dual objective of price stability and full employment, the Fed has said it will eventually raise short-term interest rates, which have been kept near zero since 2008 to stimulate growth. The coalition says since the economy isn’t yet strong enough to stand on its own, the Fed should maintain its easy-money policies, which make lending cheap for borrowers and businesses but don’t do much to boost those on fixed incomes like retirees.

“We're going to talk about our request that the Fed create more transparency in a democratic process for appointments and that it adopt more pro-jobs, pro-wages policies, more expansionary policies, so as to get us to full employment,” says Ady Barkan, staff attorney at the left-leaning Center for Popular Democracy, which is part of the coalition. “They need to target higher wage growth instead of stepping on the brakes the moment that wages start to rise, which is what the hawks want to do."

The term "hawk" refers to those who see the labor market as strong enough to merit a faster interest rate hike to keep inflation in check and pertains to outgoing regional Fed bank presidents Richard Fisher of Dallas and Charles Plosser of Philadelphia. Doves, like Yellen, believe that there is still enough slack in the labor market to warrant maintaining as low interest rates as possible.

Each of the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks selects its own president through a process that’s criticized as rather opaque. Those presidents rotate on five of the 12 seats on the Federal Open Market Committee, the group at the Fed that sets interest rates. The remaining seven members of the committee, including Yellen, are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

The 12 regional presidents report back to the rest of the Fed about economic trends from their respective districts on a regular basis – a compilation of data amalgamated in a “Beige Book” published eight times a year and used to assess the economy’s health.

A spokeswoman for the Philadelphia Fed said it has retained the services of executive search firm Korn Ferry to replace Plosser and “will consider a diverse group of candidates from inside and outside the Federal Reserve system.” A Dallas Fed representative said the bank’s board of directors is meeting today to discuss the presidential search process to replace Fisher.

Stronger economic data this year have prompted many to wonder whether the Fed should start raising interest rates sooner rather than later. The U.S. economy’s reached the lowest jobless rate in six years and has enjoyed the strongest stretch of job gains since 1999.

But the coalition argues that despite what the national numbers may say about the recovery, they don’t necessarily speak to the experience of a lot of people who still feel the recession in their communities.

Even though the Dallas metropolitan area had one of the strongest monthly job gains in the country in September and has a jobless rate of 5 percent, well below the national rate of 5.8 percent, Connie Paredes, a volunteer with the Texas Organizing Project who will meet with Yellen Friday, says the economy in Dallas still feels “not that great.”

“There are a lot of statistics out there about the unemployment rate and how things have gotten better. It doesn't really reflect the fact that there is a lot of underemployment,” Paredes says. “There are a lot of college graduates who aren't able to find jobs. There are a lot of professionals who have to take on extra jobs in order to make ends meet.”

But attempting to change the appointment system might not be the solution to get more “everyday” voices before the Fed. Guy Lebas, chief fixed income strategist at Janney Capital Markets, says it’s a “solution in search of a problem.”

“There’s very little wrong from an economic perspective with how the Fed selection process works now, and a majority of the members who have input into monetary policy are democratically selected,” Lebas says.

Yellen herself has said it’s important to maintain a diverse group of viewpoints within the Fed.

“I believe decisions by the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Open Market Committee are better because of the range of views and perspectives brought to the table by my fellow policymakers, and I have encouraged this approach to decision-making at all levels and throughout the Fed System,” she said in an Oct. 30 speech in Washington.

There’s also a push in Congress for changes at the Fed. The new GOP leadership could introduce a new version of former congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul’s Audit the Fed bill, which, as its name implies, calls for a full audit of the Fed – including internal discussions on monetary policy – by the Government Accountability Office. Critics worry if passed, the bill would allow Congress to interfere with the Fed’s decision-making.

And a level of independence from the public may not be such a bad thing, says Gary Burtless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, citing the Fed’s handling of the economic crisis – which included bailing out large financial institutions and beginning unprecedented and controversial economic stimulus programs.

“I realize many things the Fed did, although most economists think were entirely justified, are still immensely unpopular among the public, but so what?” Burtless says. “We do have this layer of insulation that I think we should protect. The events of 2007 through 2009 confirm the absolute importance of having that level of insulation so that members of the Federal Reserve Board don’t worry that their deliberations, their decisions about monetary policy, are going to be immediately undone by populist and perhaps poorly understood objections from the general public.”

Source

Times Union - August 21, 2014, by Casey Seiler - The Center for Popular Democracy, a labor-backed advocacy group that supports New York's controversial Scaffold Law, wants to see all the drafts of a controversial report authored by SUNY's Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government and paid for by the Lawsuit Reform Alliance, a business-backed organization that opposes Scaffold Law.

The Alliance paid almost $83,000 for the Institute's analysis of the law's economic impacts. That report, made public in February, has been the subject of fierce debate — over both the details of the study as well as larger issues of academic integrity. The Rockefeller Institute, which insists its work was done with independence and integrity, subsequently backed away from the most controversial chapter of the report, which included a statistical analysis that concluded gravity-related accidents fell in Illinois after the state ditched its version.

The law, which places "absolute liability" on employers for gravity-related workplace injuries, is supported by labor unions but opposed by business groups that claim it needlessly drives up construction costs. Opponents would like to see New York follow other states by adopting a "comparative negligence" standard that would make workers proportionately responsible when their actions contribute to an accident.

An initial Freedom of Information Law request from the Center for Popular Democracy resulted in SUNY's release of email communications between Rockefeller Institute researchers and Tom Stebbins of the Lawsuit Reform Alliance — contact that was required by the contract for the report.

On appeal, SUNY released an initial draft copy of the report that had been attached to one of those emails. The Times Union last week offered a side-by-side comparison of the draft and final versions. Changes between the two tended to increase the report's toll of the cost and impact of the law, though the researchers argue those edits represented good-faith efforts to seek the best data. The Center is now requesting to see all interim drafts of the report submitted to the Lawsuit Reform Alliance for review. "Given that the anti-worker groups behind this debunked report are still trying to use its flawed findings to weaken New York's safety laws, SUNY should release all of the drafts that we know exist," said Josie Duffy, a policy advocate with the group.

Source