CPD IN THE NEWS

Today, Center for Popular Democracy Action releases the first major report on New York wage theft since 2009. The report, By a Thousand Cuts: The Complex Face of Wage Theft in New York, identifies 11 ‘bad actors’, which are employers with a history of wage theft that is either particularly egregious or that exemplifies a broader trend in key New York sectors.

The companies highlighted in the report have a history of committing various wage theft violations, such as denying benefits, failing to pay overtime or minimum wage, making illegal deductions from pay checks, telling workers to work off the clock, and misclassifying workers as freelancers or independent contractors to avoid paying benefits.

 Despite passage of the Wage Theft Prevention Act of 2010, which gives New York the strongest laws in the nation, an estimated 2.1 million New Yorkers are still victims of wage theft annually, cheated out of a cumulative $3.2 billion in wages and benefits they are owed. The report contains never-before-released testimonies from impacted workers.

Protesters from The New York Coalition against Wage Theft gathered at 11 a.m. in front of a worksite run by asbestos removal company New York Insulation Inc., one of the bad actors identified in the report.

 “New Yorkers are being cheated out of their hard earned wages, and it has to stop now,” said New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer. “The bottom line is that an honest day’s work deserves an honest day’s pay –and if a company cheats workers out of their wages, we will catch them and they will pay. I commend Make the Road New York and the Center for Popular Democracy for issuing this new report and continuing the fight against wage theft.”

 “Despite good laws on the books, wage theft continues at epidemic proportions impacting millions of workers each year. It is, in effect, a massive crime wave that costs New Yorkers billions and exacerbates poverty and inequity in our state,” says Meg Fosque, low-wage organizing director at Make the Road.

 “Wage theft is a pervasive crime, rather than the practice of a few unscrupulous employers. And, companies build business strategies on the bet that they will never be called to account for stealing their employees’ wages and undercutting high-road businesses. We need robust and resourced enforcement efforts to protect workers’livelihoods and the ability of fair employers to do business,” says Connie Razza, Director of Strategic Research at the Center for Popular Democracy.

 "The depth and breadth of the wage theft problem is crippling our economy. The construction industry, tax payers, and workers all equally feel the pain of wage theft. This is not a victimless crime. When responsible contractors operating within the laws of New York State are put at a disadvantage against those ignoring these same laws, we must all unite to fix this problem," says Patrick J. Purcell, Executive Director with Greater New York LECET. 

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www.populardemocracy.org The Center for Popular Democracy promotes equity, opportunity, and a dynamic democracy in partnership with innovative base-building organizations, organizing networks and alliances, and progressive unions across the country. CPD builds the strength and capacity of democratic organizations to envision and advance a pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial justice agenda.

Huffington Post - December 22, 2014, by Ana Garcia-Ashley - It was heartening to see Missouri's Attorney General finally take action by suing at least 13 municipalities due to their excessive court fees last week.

As the ACLU and the NAACP target the Ferguson Florissant school district to get more diverse representation on their school board, which is heavily white, we see progress on that front as well.

Gamaliel affiliate MCU and its allies are working to get County Executive-elect Steve Stenger to hold a county-wide summit of law enforcement officials and local mayors to promote community policing and an end to racial profiling and excessive court fees. So far, Stenger has agreed in principle to the summit, but a date has not been secured.

We believe it is essential to take a long hard look at what works in the long term in communities of color. In our more than 20 years of organizing, we have found that nothing works better than jobs at getting people off the street and putting money into low-income neighborhoods.

We must put in place criminal justice reforms, but we must put equal attention toward creating more and better jobs as a key long term solution. For that, we must continue our advocacy and organizing efforts.

What we found in our new study, "Jobs and More Jobs" was that in 2012 and 2013, among our 43 affiliates and across 16 states, the Gamaliel network won public policy campaign victories worth more than $13 billion, creating more than 450,000 jobs and generating more than a $17 billion increase in the gross domestic product. The victories ranged from transit access to criminal justice and even included food justice wins. The key takeaway of Jobs and More Jobs is this: organizing creates jobs.

Organizing creates the public space in which real people come together around a shared set of values to build powerful coalitions that improve the civil, social and economic conditions of their communities and it develops leaders who effectively wage and sustain long-term campaigns around the issues they face.

All community organizers have a similar impact -- not just Gamaliel. We urge our colleagues to assess their own impact. Center for Popular Democracy, DART, Casa de Maryland and others could post similar results.

In the end, we know what works post-Ferguson - jobs. We also know how to get there -- organizing. As Margaret Mead said; "Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have."

The 25 page study, called "Jobs and More Jobs," is available for download.

Source

A former aide to Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen has broken ranks with his former employer and issued a blueprint for a sweeping reform of the U.S. central bank, including regular government audits and shorter term limits for policy makers.

Dartmouth College professor Andrew Levin targeted four areas of change for the Federal Reserve system: make the Fed a fully public institution; ensure the process of picking regional Fed presidents is transparent; set seven-year term limits for regional presidents and Board governors; and make the entire Fed subject to external review.

The proposals were taken up by the union-backed activist group Fed Up, which promoted them Monday in a conference call with journalists, and come during an election year where the central bank has been a campaign topic.

“There is one key principle in this document which is the Fed needs to become a public institution,” Levin said. “Pragmatic, reasonable Fed reform should be able to be passed by the Congress, by both parties. That is my hope.”

The Dartmouth professor worked two decades at the Fed, and was a special adviser from 2010 to 2012 to former chairman Ben S. Bernanke, and Yellen when she was vice chair, according to his biography page at the university.

Legislative Plans

Republicans in the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives last year proposed legislation that included reforms of the central bank, though none has become law. Fed spokeswoman Michelle Smith declined to comment.

As recently as February, Yellen said that while the Fed might be structured differently if it were created today, she believed it still worked well and wasn’t “broken.”

“Of course the structure could be something different and it’s up to Congress to decide that -- I certainly respect that,” she said at a Senate hearing. “I simply mean to say I don’t think it’s broken the way it is.”

The Fed system, which sets interest rates for the U.S. economy, is made up of a Board of Governors in Washington and 12 regional Fed banks. It was created by an act of Congress, yet private banks hold stock in the regional Fed institutions as a result of the way the capital structure was set up when the Fed was born more than a century ago.

“The Federal Reserve is the only central bank that I know of that isn’t a fully public central bank,” Levin said in an interview.

Levin said the 12 regional banks should become fully public entities, meaning they have to somehow eliminate or repurchase the stock they have issued to private member banks. He also proposed banning anyone affiliated with financial institutions overseen by the Fed from serving as a regional Fed director.

Three Classes

Each regional Fed has a nine-member board of directors which includes three Class A directors who represent private member banks, three Class B directors picked by the private banks to represent the public -- typically local business people -- and three Class C directors chosen to represent the public by the Fed board in Washington.

The presence of financial interests on Fed boards has been a long-standing source of criticism. Currently, for example, James Gorman, chairman and chief executive of Morgan Stanley, sits on the New York Fed Board as a Class A director.

Prior the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform act in 2010, Class A directors also helped pick the 12 regional Fed bank presidents, subject to the approval of the board in Washington. That potential conflict of interest, with bankers appointing their own supervisors, was limited by Dodd-Frank, which restricted the selection process to Class B and Class C directors.

Levin said the current system of picking Fed presidents, which is led by regional board directors, is too secretive. He recommended the reserve bank boards accept nominations from the public, publish a list of eligible nominees, and then engage in a “selection process that involves genuine public participation.”

The Dartmouth professor also said that the entire Fed system should be subject to “external reviews” and disclosure requirements “just like every other key public agency.”

“The Government Accountability Office should produce a regular annual review of all aspects of the Fed’s policies, procedures, management, and operations,” Levin wrote in his proposal. The Fed has strenuously objected to calls by Republican lawmakers that monetary policy decisions be subject to GAO audit. In the interview, Levin said the GAO should focus on the management and operations of the Fed system, “not so much on monetary policy.”

“Part of the financial crisis was due to mismanagement in the division of supervision at the Fed,” Levin said in an interview. GAO reviews would provide assurance to the public and Congress that the “Fed is a well-managed organization,” he said.

By Craig Torres

Source

Activists are trying to combat both the accelerated tracking and detaining of immigrants and the use of for-profit prisons to hold them by targeting the big banks that prop up for-profit prison companies.

Read the full article here.