De Blasio’s Executive Order Increases, Expands Living Wage
Amsterdam News - October 9, 2014, by Stephon Johnson - Last week, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio signed an...
Amsterdam News - October 9, 2014, by Stephon Johnson - Last week, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio signed an executive order to increase and expand the living wage to benefit more New Yorkers.
At City Hall, while announcing the signing of his executive order, De Blasio said “$13.13 for those without benefits, $11.50 for those who have health insurance and other benefits. This applies to employers, excuse me, employees, I should say, of large groups of employers who do business with the city. Meaning, there’s a lot of companies that do business with the city, that come to the city for subsidies. We think if you want a subsidy, you can prove the need for a subsidy. We want to help you achieve your goals, but we have a standard we hold.”
De Blasio continued, “We need to make sure people are paid a living wage. That’s a fair exchange for that subsidy. What it means—let me put this in real terms—what this means, is the difference between the $8-an-hour minimum wage right now, and the $13.13 that will take effect immediately for those employees of companies that get subsidies going forward. That is a difference of over $10,000 dollars in earnings a year. $10,000. Someone who would have made $16,000—not enough to get by—will now make over $27,000 a year. And that’s a difference maker.”
According to de Blasio, any project that gets more than a million dollars in city subsidies qualifies, stating that it will reach people in lines of work like retail, food services and construction.
Advocates for a raise in the minimum wage have said this action was a long time coming. Shantel Walker, a Papa John’s employee who makes $8.50 an hour and who is a member of Fast Food Forward, praised de Blasio’s actions.
“Nearly two years ago, 200 fast-food workers in New York City walked off our jobs, calling for $15 and union rights,” said Walker in a statement. “Our demand may have sounded crazy at the time, but more and more, $15 is becoming a reality for workers across the country. As we’ve gone on strike again and again and a movement that started here in New York has spread to 150 cities, $15 suddenly doesn’t seem so impossible. From Seattle to Los Angeles to San Francisco and now New York, cities are raising wages so we don’t have to rely on public assistance to support our families.”
Walker also stated that the recent developments are a sign, to her, that minimum wage advocates are on the right side of history.
“While he works with Gov. Cuomo to raise wages for all New Yorkers, Mayor de Blasio’s move today to put workers at city-subsidized projects on a path to $15 is a sign that we are winning,” Walker said. “It’s a step in the right direction and helps push us forward in our fight for $15 for workers across the entire country.”
While the city’s working class has achieved a major victory, the state’s working class is still making the push collectively. Andrew Friedman, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, pushed for Albany to follow suit in a statement.
“The Albany wage board should eliminate the tipped minimum wage to make this vision a reality and end the wage segregation that traps workers in poverty—workers who are overwhelmingly female and of color,” said Friedman. “Partnering with progressive local, state and federal leadership means we can work together to afford a dignified life for all residents, which means comprehensive policies that include a $15 minimum hourly wage, a predictable and fair workweek, paid sick days and a healthy macro-economy that nurtures equity, creates viable new jobs and protects us from risk-taking by financial institutions.”
Back in the five boroughs, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams praised de Blasio for the executive order, citing it as another example of New York City leading the pack. He said that de Blasio had “reaffirmed his commitment to civic innovation and our residents’ welfare by raising the living wage and furthering its reach to thousands more workers. This is a measure that recognizes the cost of living challenges that New Yorkers face and builds a meaningful bridge over the inequality gap we have sought to close across Brooklyn and the rest of the five boroughs.
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Hurricane Maria vigil on track in Hartford
Despite confusion over permits, police and city officials say they’re working with two local community groups to help...
Despite confusion over permits, police and city officials say they’re working with two local community groups to help them hold a march and vigil Thursday to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Maria.
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New York City considers ban of on-call scheduling in retail
Dive Brief: The New York City Council on Tuesday introduced a package of bills that would ban on-call scheduling and...
Dive Brief:
The New York City Council on Tuesday introduced a package of bills that would ban on-call scheduling and other inflexible, unpredictable scheduling practices deemed unfair by retail workers and many policymakers, according to the council's website.
The bills in some cases go further than what has been proposed by Mayor Bill de Blasio, who said in September he would push for legislation to give fast food and retail workers advance notice of schedules and penalty pay for last-minute changes.
The state of New York has also pushed against on-call scheduling practices, with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office warning several retailers that aspects of such practices are already against state law, which prompted Urban Outfitters, Gap Inc., L. Brands, J. Crew, Pier 1 and Abercrombie & Fitch to end on-call scheduling.
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Dive Insight:
Algorithms in scheduling software have helped retailers cut costs through efficient staffing, but have also made life difficult for workers who are trying to manage households, attend school or work additional jobs. New York isn’t the only place to find growing antipathy toward the practice of on-call scheduling. Seattle, San Francisco and Bay Area city Emeryville have also passed laws limiting and penalizing the practice.
In New York, the proposed bills would ensure that when hours become available, they’re offered first to existing employees, before new workers are hired. Many part-time workers remain willing to work full-time but can’t find the positions, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. This will offer a pathway to full-time work. The bills also provide remedies and protections to retail workers when on-call scheduling does occur and establish a process for employees to seek flexible work arrangements, among other provisions.
"People working in fast food and retail have made clear that higher wages are not enough without hours they can count on," Elianne Farhat, Deputy Campaign Director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy, said in a statement emailed to Retail Dive. "Now more than ever, parents and students need more input into their work hours so they can balance working hard with caring for their families, attending college classes and participating in our community.”
Indeed, retailers should be prepared to see more such concerns, warnings and even legislation from more states and jurisdictions across the country as on call scheduling gets more scrutiny, Gail Gottehrer, a labor and employment litigator at Axinn Veltrop & Harkrider in New York, told Retail Dive last year. “This can be especially difficult for multi-state employers,” Gottehrer said. “If you’re in a lot of jurisdictions it can be complicated to get things right.”
By Daphne Howland
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Castro moves to stop VP fire from the left
Targeted by progressive activists hoping to kill his chances of being Hillary Clinton’s running mate, Julián Castro is...
Targeted by progressive activists hoping to kill his chances of being Hillary Clinton’s running mate, Julián Castro is set this week to announce changes to a hot-button Housing and Urban Development program to sell bad mortgages on its books.
The changes, which HUD officials will brief stakeholders and activists on during a conference call on Monday, could be made public as early as Tuesday — depending on when department lawyers give the green light to publishing them in the Federal Register.
But they won’t take effect before the next auction of HUD mortgages, scheduled for May 18.
Castro’s actions could potentially defuse an issue that activists have been using to question his progressive credentials — and he’ll be doing it at the moment the running mate search has begun to get serious at Clinton campaign headquarters.
Among the changes, according to people with knowledge of what’s coming: The Federal Housing Authority will put out a new plan requiring investors to offer principal reduction for all occupied loans, start a new requirement that all loan modifications be fixed for at least five years and limit any subsequent increase to 1 percent per year, and create a “walk-away prohibition” to block any purchaser of single-family mortgages from abandoning lower-value properties in the hopes of preventing neighborhood blight.
HUD officials say that the timing isn’t a response to the activist pressure or the presidential campaign calendar.
“It has always been our goal to get the policy right, regardless of arbitrary deadlines, and we expect to announce those changes this week,” said HUD press secretary Cameron French.
But the changes come after two years of calls by activists — joined last September by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — for major reforms to the Distressed Asset Stabilization Program. Their calculations — numbers that HUD says are way off — allege that during Castro’s tenure, 98 percent of problematic mortgages the department has sold went to Wall Street firms that they say were responsible for the housing crisis in the first place.
With the backdrop of a Democratic Party recalibrated by Bernie Sanders’ surprisingly strong candidacy, activists were preparing a full offensive against Castro this week, looking to leverage his political ambitions against him to extract major concessions.
Last Thursday, activists sent an ultimatum letter to HUD titled, “Seeking swift changes to HUD's DASP program,” and demanding response within 24 hours. They had set up a national day of action for Tuesday, with protests scheduled at HUD offices in New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco, along with a news conference at Newark City Hall — which remains on for now, pending whether they feel HUD has gone far enough in what the agency tells stakeholders on Monday afternoon.
“I would say we’re cautiously optimistic, but we don’t know, and what we need to see is a plan that will lead to substantially more mortgages not getting into the hands of bad actors and saving more homes from foreclosure,” said Amy Schur, campaign director for the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, on Sunday afternoon. “Unless we see that, it’s going to be a problem.”
Schur has been in touch with HUD regularly over the course of the past two years, and in recent weeks when the conversations stepped up after the activists fired a warning shot against Castro by launching a public effort built around the website DontSellOurHomestoWallStreet.org.
That first attack on Castro in early April prompted a number of leaders to rush to his defense — some because they felt the criticisms were unfair, others because they were eager to protect the future of arguably the most promising Latino rising star in the Democratic Party.
“Some of y’all may have seen recently concerns that were voiced about DASP,” Castro said last week in an appearance at a National Association of Realtors event teasing the changes.
“We’re improving that and have been working to do that to ensure that folks are able to stay in their homes longer because they’re offered principal reduction in certain instances,” Castro said, “that we get better outcomes for neighborhoods by making sure that folks who secure those loans aren’t able to just walk away from those properties and by instituting something that we refer to [as] ‘payment shock protection’ to make sure that once payments are modified that they don’t just jump up a couple years later.”
Other members of the coalition and signatories on the ultimatum letter are American Family Voices, the Center for Popular Democracy Action, Daily Kos, Democracy for America, MoveOn.org Civic Action, New York Communities for Change, Other 98% Action, Presente.org, RootsAction.org, the Rootstrikers Project at Demand Progress and the Working Families Party.
Schur said that she and others are hoping that HUD will include some method of incentivizing mortgage sales through early bidding or favorable rates to nonprofits and neighborhood groups, rather than the Wall Street firms that have bought many of the mortgages. They feel that large financial institutions don’t care about the effect on neighborhoods from letting properties go vacant or decline, or of overwhelming homeowners with liabilities — though many argue that the reason these institutions buy so many of the mortgages is that they are the only ones that have the capital and management capability to handle the purchases.
“Where we would like to be with HUD is partnering to roll out a positive program in our cities across the country,” Schur said. “We’d rather be doing that than protesting. But if the changes are insufficient and this program is going to continue to be almost a wholesale giveaway to speculators, we’re going to have to keep the pressure up. We’re not going to have a choice.”
HUD officials point out that the May 18 auction isn’t for the DASP program and call the complaints surrounding that unfair. It is for different mortgages, called an “aged loan sale,” scheduled before these reforms were far along. No DASP auction has been set yet for 2016, and reconsideration of the program, according to French, has been underway since the most recent DASP auction, at the end of last year.
“Since 2014, FHA has made changes to the DASP program before every sale. FHA has been working on the latest round of changes to the DASP program for months, and, in our desire to be as comprehensive as possible, we’ve engaged a broad group of stakeholders on the potential reforms that would make the most impact for distressed homeowners,” French said.
Activists had been growing frustrated with the pace and substance of the conversations with HUD, and HUD officials have been losing patience with them as well, feeling that the activists are out for attention and landing on Castro simply because his name is in the running mate mix.
And, well aware that this is a critical political moment for Castro, activists warn that they’re ready to keep after him until the Democratic convention in July, and beyond that if he is Clinton’s pick.
“We would all love for the secretary to really come through in a big way, but housing activists and folks in our neighborhoods are not going to stop when our neighborhoods are being sold off to Wall Street. There has to be a major, major change,” said Jonathan Westin, director of New York Communities for Change. “Folks are completely ready to keep pushing.”
By Edward-Isaac Dovere
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Activists Protest Universities Over Investments In Puerto Rico Bondholders
Activists Protest Universities Over Investments In Puerto Rico Bondholders
A coalition of social and economic justice groups has launched a one-week campaign to end what they view as problematic...
A coalition of social and economic justice groups has launched a one-week campaign to end what they view as problematic university investments. The New York-based Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) and partner organizations including three Make the Road branches will hold six protests along the East Coast, calling on Columbia, Harvard and Yale to pull their investments out of hedge funds that hold Puerto Rican debt and have advocated austerity measures in the U.S. territory, leading to mass school closings and higher tuition costs.
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Ana María Archila: Low Wage Workers are Paving the Way to Democracy
GRITtv - February 18, 2014, by Laura Flanders - Bill de Blasio campaigned on ushering in a new era in New York City...
GRITtv - February 18, 2014, by Laura Flanders - Bill de Blasio campaigned on ushering in a new era in New York City and actively pursued low-wage voters. Now that he is Mayor, what can the people who elected him do to influence what happens next? It is a question grassroots groups grapple with around the country. On GRITtv this week, Ana María Archila shares a few ideas. Archila was a founder of one of the most effective community groups in New York; now she's heading up a regional initiative that seeks to build popular democracy, not only at the ballot box, but in between elections.
From the school to prison pipeline and stop and frisk to immigration reform and workplace safety regulations, New Yorkers are eager to seize the moment for political change, says Archila. For evidence, consider the crowds that gathered at the Talking Transition Tent which was set up in downtown, immediately following last fall's elections.
Mayor Bill de Blasio seems to be listening. Less than two months into his term he has expanded paid sick leave for hundreds of workers around the city, one of the central demands of low wage workers. But how do people ensure that this momentum continues?
"He is only listening because low wage workers are extremely organized," Co-Executive Director for the Center for Popular Democracy Ana María Archila tells GRITtv. "New Yorkers are demanding more."
In addition to paid sick leave, organizers with Make the Road New York (the community organization that Archila describes as her "organizing home") are campaigning for a raise in the minimum wage and increased work place safety regulations. Organizing locally and creating small scale initiatives, like worker or consumer co-ops, can help engage people and address some immediate needs, but ultimately, low wage Americans need to build political power.
"The biggest co-operative we have is our own government and we need to make sure that it works for us," she says.
For more on ushering in a new progressive era, watch our interview with Joo-Hyun Kang on ending the Stop and Frisk regime.
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Puerto Rican Families Displaced in Florida by Hurricane María Recruited as Potential Voters
Puerto Rican Families Displaced in Florida by Hurricane María Recruited as Potential Voters
The Summer for Puerto Rico campaign is spearheaded by Julio López Varona, the Director of Puerto Rico Diaspora...
The Summer for Puerto Rico campaign is spearheaded by Julio López Varona, the Director of Puerto Rico Diaspora Campaigns at the Center for Popular Democracy. He emphasized that the focus of the campaign is on promoting political empowerment and literacy, by providing context on who are the lawmakers, and teaching communities about the effects of colonialism.
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The Fair Workweek bill is approved by City Council
Philly is following the example of New York City, Seattle, San Francisco, Washington D.C. and the state of Oregon, all...
Philly is following the example of New York City, Seattle, San Francisco, Washington D.C. and the state of Oregon, all of which have been lobbied by the "Fair Workweek Initiative," a program of the left wing non-profit Center for Popular Democracy, which has been funded by several large groups including the Ford Foundation and George Soros' Open Society Foundation.
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Workers’ groups show candidates that supporting higher wages wins votes
Workers’ groups show candidates that supporting higher wages wins votes
Several worker advocacy groups in swing states are showing senatorial candidates that according to polls, voters...
Several worker advocacy groups in swing states are showing senatorial candidates that according to polls, voters support raising the minimum wage and expanding eligibility for overtime pay.
The groups include the National Employment Law Project (NELP), the Center for Popular Democracy Action Fund and the Working Families Party. They report that when voters learn that GOP incumbent senators oppose raising the minimum wage and expanding overtime pay eligibility, they often switch their support to Democratic challengers.
This might greatly influence the outcome of close U.S. Senate races in Pennsylvania, Missouri, Ohio, New Hampshire and Arizona.
Forty four Senate Republicans have signed a resolution opposing the overtime pay expansion the U.S. Labor Department plans to implement December 1.
“Voters are fed up with lack of action in Washington on raising wages for working people, and what we’re seeing is that just letting voters know where the candidates stand on these issues can have a significant impact,” Dan Cantor, executive director of the Working Families Party, says.
He cited polls that found:
▪ Nationally, voters support expanding overtime pay eligibility by a three-to-one ratio. Just over half of voters say they would oppose a candidate who opposes the expansion.
▪ In Pennsylvania, three-fourths of voters say they support raising the minimum wage. Also, by an 81 to 15 percent margin, they say they approve of expanding eligibility for overtime pay. Fifty seven percent of voters say they will oppose candidates who do not support these goals. (Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Katie McGinty has made raising the minimum wage a key plank in her race against GOP Sen. Pat Toomey.)
▪ In Missouri, voters approve expanding overtime pay eligibility by a 76 to 16 percent margin. If a candidate opposes the idea, 53 percent of voters say it would lessen their support.
▪ In Ohio, voters approve expanding overtime pay eligibility by an 80 to14 percent margin. And if a candidate opposes the idea, 51 percent of voters say they would lessen their support.
“Working women and men should be paid for the time they work, period. The Obama administration’s decision to increase the overtime threshold is an enormous, in many cases life-changing, win for working people, from fast-food, retail and healthcare managers to post-doctoral associates and counselors,” Service Employees President Mary Kay Henry has said.
She continued: “This action will put more money in people’s pockets and boost the economy. It will boost women, African Americans, Latinos, people who are early in their careers and people who have modest education levels – the very people hardest hit by the 40-year assault on working people built on phony trickle-down economics.”
“Raising wages includes lifting national wages, but it’s far broader than that,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has said. “We want earned sick leave and paid family leave. We want full employment, fair overtime rules and fair scheduling so people won’t have to guess whether they’ll get enough hours to pay the rent.”
The Working Families Party, the NELP Action Fund and their allies are working to inform workers about where candidates for office from president down to city councilperson stand on raising wages,” said NELP fund spokesman Paul Sonn.
By Mark Gruenberg
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How Hillary Clinton can win in November
Hillary Clinton may be tempted to relax into her inevitable nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate given a...
Hillary Clinton may be tempted to relax into her inevitable nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate given a sizable delegate lead that looks likely to hold going into the Democratic convention — particularly if she wins the big prize of New York in April.
However, even after the convention, she will need to woo her opponent's supporters — many of whom claim they won't vote for her — to prevail in an unpredictable general election against an unconventional candidate like Donald Trump.
Bernie Sanders has been buoyed consistently by supporters disgusted with a political system awash in big money — and dismayed by Clinton's uncomfortably close relationship to Wall Street. There is a simple move Clinton can make to prove she is willing to take bold action against Wall Street: She can bring back the Glass-Steagall Act that put up a firewall between commercial and investment banking.
Over the course of recent Democratic debates, Clinton has remained opposed to reinstating Glass-Steagall even as Sanders used the rallying cry of breaking up the banks to help lock up several Midwest and Northeastern primaries.
The division between commercial and investment banking imposed by Glass-Steagall, enacted in 1933 amid the Great Depression, prevented banks from using customer deposits to take high-octane gambles in the market that could bring on another financial cataclysm.
Then, in 1999, under heavy pressure from the financial industry, Glass-Steagall was repealed by President Bill Clinton, unleashing the rise of a number of behemoth banks with combined commercial and investment arms. Less than a decade later, most of them nearly combusted in the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, requiring billions in taxpayer bailout funds to stay afloat.
Today, Wall Street continues to be riddled with systemic risks. The Dodd-Frank financial reforms enacted in 2010 in the wake of the financial crisis helped reduce some of the risk, but as the new president of the Minneapolis Fed recently acknowledged, they didn't go far enough. "I believe the biggest banks are still too big to fail and continue to pose a significant, ongoing risk to our economy," Neel Kashkari — a Republican – told an audience at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. last month.
An even more unlikely proponent of reining in big banks is Asher Edelman, the inspiration for Gordon Gekko in the movie "Wall Street." In a recent interview with CNBC, Edelman called for banks to return to lending, which stimulates middle class spending and the overall economy, rather than speculation, which pads the balance sheets of the big banks, not to mention the pockets of the top 1 percent.
While the Volcker Rule — the set piece of the Dodd-Frank reforms — bans commercial banks from using customer deposits for speculative trading on the bank's own accounts, numerous exceptions permit commercial banks to engage in risky investment banking activities they would be unable to carry out under Glass-Steagall. It's not difficult to conjure a scenario in which using customer deposits to bolster market bets causes a global financial contagion on the order of — or greater than — what we witnessed in 2008.
Some argue that Glass-Steagall is unnecessary because many of the financial institutions that triggered the financial crisis, such as Bear Stearns, were purely focused on trading and didn't have commercial banking arms. But those failed investment banks were able to take their risky gambles because they could easily borrow from hybrid entities such as Citigroup. And we should not forget that commercial-investment bank hybrids like Citigroup and Bank of America were ultimately some of the biggest recipients of bailout money.
The solution must be a stronger wall between commercial and investment banking. Senators Elizabeth Warren andJohn McCain have already proposed bipartisan legislation to bring back an updated, stronger version of the Glass-Steagall legislation specifically focused on banning publicly supported banks from engaging in the type of practices that created the financial crisis.
Afraid of Congressional gridlock? A President Clinton could even avoid a dysfunctional Congress altogether by working with bank regulators to create many of the same activity limitations through executive action — but only if she appoints strong regulators dedicated to reining in Wall Street.
With an increasingly likely path to the general election ahead of her, Hillary Clinton in the next few months must strive to shed her image of being beholden to wealthy, Wall Street interests. Reinstating Glass-Steagall is a good way to start.
By Anita Jain
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