CPD IN THE NEWS

Municipal leaders and labor activists nationwide who fought for a $15 minimum wage now want to serve up a “fair workweek” and steady hours for fast-food workers.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio set a plan in motion last week to give 65,000 hourly workers in the city's fast-food industry more stable work schedules by requiring a two-week notice for employee shift assignments. City Council members have vowed to introduce the legislation in the coming weeks.

In Seattle, the City Council on Monday gave its unanimous approval to a similar ordinance, which will affect well-known retail and food service establishments, as well as certain full-service restaurants. Mayor Ed Murray is scheduled to sign the ordinance into law by next week.

While supporters of such proposals – called “secure scheduling” in Seattle – say working families need protection against erratic work schedules, some retail organizations argue these concerns have been blown out of proportion. The Washington Retail Association said the Seattle ordinance would make work schedules less flexible.

“The effects of the law threaten to reduce available work hours for retail employees, reduce hiring opportunities and impose burdensome bookkeeping and fines on retailers deemed to be in violation of the law,” the retail association said in a news release.

Other business groups, however, don’t see the scheduling legislation as a major burden for employers. Mark Jaffe, chief executive officer of the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce, told AMI Newswire that the proposal is fair and that it wouldn’t cause fast-food eateries to go out of business.

“How hard is it to schedule people two weeks in advance?” he said.

A number of citywide initiatives, from affordable housing to reasonable transportation options, have helped New York City maintain a productive workforce, Jaffe said, and the Fair Workweek legislation would do the same. “We don’t believe it’s an unreasonable burden on the employer,” he said. “This is a no-brainer.”

The proposal was directed toward fast-food workers because that’s where most of the scheduling concerns originate, Jaffe said. Many of those employees need to map out their schedules in advance because they often work more than one job, he said.

The New York State Restaurant Association expressed concern about the proposed legislation but hopes it can work with city officials to reduce the burden to its members.

“It’s troubling that fast-food restaurants, which are really a local franchisee-run small business, have been singled out yet again when these restaurants are already being subjected to greater regulations than any other industry,” said the restaurant association’s chief executive officer, Melissa Fleischut, in a prepared statement. “Labor costs for quick-serve restaurants are skyrocketing, and under state law the hospitality industry is already subject to call-in pay and extra pay for a longer-than-10 spread of hours in a single day.”

In addition to providing employees a two-week notice on work schedules, the New York City proposal would force employers who make last-minute schedule changes to pay extra compensation to affected workers. The plan would also place restrictions on the practice of what’s called “clopening” – when an employee is required to work a closing shift followed by an opening shift.

“We will regulate that practice and require that there be at least 10 hours between a closing shift and an opening shift that a worker has to perform,” de Blasio said during a public announcement last week.

The mayor dismissed anticipated concerns about layoffs resulting from the proposal, saying that he heard the same rumblings when the city was moving to expand paid sick leave for workers. “Guess what happened?” de Blasio said. “This city has added 290,000 private-sector jobs.”

Jan Teague, chief executive officer of the Washington Retail Association, said in a prepared statement that the Seattle proposal could limit the ability of businesses to take part in the city’s Summer Youth Employment Program and make it more difficult for college students to find temporary jobs over the summer and during holidays.

Teague has also expressed concern that employers would end up paying higher “predictive pay” to workers in order to fill shifts resulting from a worker calling in sick or quitting abruptly.

“Any way you slice it, this ordinance will make the workplace less flexible to meet the needs of employees and employers,” Teague said during the debate over the Seattle measure. “Sadly, this ordinance will reduce the number of hours available for many retail and restaurant employees – and they cannot afford to see their incomes go down.”

In addition, she took issue with the idea of discouraging time allotments between shifts of less than 10 hours. Some workers want to have shifts close together during part of the week to free up time later for second jobs or helping to care for a family member, Teague said.

The National Retailers Association took a similar position. “Government intervention in the scheduling of employees through a one-size-fits-all approach intrudes on the employer-employee relationship and creates unnecessary mandates on how a business should operate,” the association said in a statement on its website.

Despite such concerns, the pro-worker advocacy group Center for Popular Democracy predicted that the victory for secure scheduling in Seattle would encourage other cities to follow suit.

“Those working in Seattle’s retail, restaurant and coffee chains will no longer have to turn their lives upside down just to earn enough hours to survive – and they will finally gain a greater voice in how much and when they work,” the center’s director of the Fair Workweek Initiative, Carrie Gleason, said in a prepared statement. “We can expect the vote in Seattle will inspire other cities to act.”

By Michael Carroll

Source

An activist who suffers from ALS protesting the GOP tax cuts confronted Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) over his support for the controversial proposal and asked him to change his mind.

“Why not take your stand now?” Ady Barkan asked Flake as they waited for their Thursday night flight to depart Washington, D.C. “You can be an American hero. You really could — if the votes match the speech.”

Read the full article here.

Truthout - March 2, 2015, by Dean Baker - There is an enormous amount of political debate over various pieces of legislation that are supposed to be massive job killers. For example, Republicans lambasted President Obama’s increase in taxes on the wealthy back in 2013 as a job killer. They endlessly have condemned the Affordable Care Act as a jobs killer. The same is true of proposals to raise the minimum wage.

While there is great concern in Washington over these and other imaginary job killers, the Federal Reserve Board is openly mapping out an actual job killing strategy and drawing almost no attention at all for it. The Fed’s job killing strategy centers on its plan to start raising interest rates, which is generally expected to begin at some point this year.

The Fed’s plans to raise interest rates are rarely spoken of as hurting employment, but job-killing is really at the center of the story. The rationale for raising interest rates is that inflation could begin to pick up and start to exceed the Fed’s current 2.0 percent target, if the Fed doesn’t slow the economy with higher interest rates.

Higher interest rates slow the economy by discouraging people from borrowing to buy homes or cars. They will also have some effect in discouraging businesses from investing. With reduced demand from these sectors, businesses will hire fewer workers. This will weaken the labor market, which means workers have less bargaining power. If workers have less bargaining power, they will be less well-situated to get pay increases. And if wages are not rising there will be less inflationary pressure in the economy.

The potential impact of Fed rate hikes on jobs is large. Suppose the Fed raises interest rates enough to shave 0.2 percentage points off the growth rate, say pushing growth for the year down from 2.4 percent to 2.2 percent. If we assume employment growth drops roughly in proportion to GDP growth, this would imply a reduction in the rate of job growth of almost 10 percent. If the economy would have otherwise created 2.4 million jobs over the course of the year, the Fed’s rate hikes would have cost the economy more than 200,000 jobs in this scenario.

For comparison purposes, we are having a big fight over the Keystone pipeline. The proponents of the pipeline point to the jobs created by building a pipeline as an important justification, even if the oil being pumped through the pipeline may cause enormous damage to the environment. According to the State Department’s analysis, building the pipeline would create 21,000 for two years. This pipeline related jobs gain has been widely touted in the media and is supposed to make it difficult for many members of Congress to go along with President Obama in opposing Keystone.

Yet, the Fed can easily destroy ten times as many jobs with a set of interest rate hikes this year with its actions passing largely unnoticed. In fact, the impact of Fed interest rate hikes on jobs can easily be far larger than this 200,000 number. If the Fed decides that the unemployment rate should not fall below a certain level (5.4 percent is a number is often used), then it could be costing the economy millions of jobs if the economy could actually sustain a considerably lower level of unemployment as it did in the late 1990s.

To be clear, Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen and her colleagues on the Fed’s Open Market Committee (FOMC) that determines interest rates are not evil people sitting around figuring out how to ruin the lives of American workers. The Fed has a legal mandate to control inflation, in addition to its mandate to sustain high levels of unemployment. If they raise interest rates it will be because they fear inflationary pressures will build if they let the economy continue to grow and unemployment to fall.

But this is inevitably a judgment call. The call is based on both their assessment of the risk of inflation and also the relative harm from higher rates of inflation as opposed to higher rates of unemployment. It is likely that the members of the FOMC, who largely come from the financial industry, are much more concerned about inflation than the population as a whole. They are also likely to be less concerned about unemployment. These are people who tend to read about unemployment in the data, not to see it themselves or among their friends and family members.

This is why it is important that the public be paying attention to the Fed’s interest rate policies and let them know how they feel about raising interest rates to kill jobs. The Center for Popular Democracy has organized an impressive grassroots campaign around the Fed’s interest rate policies. Those who don’t want to see the government deliberately trying to kill jobs might want to join in.Source

This is where Fed Up played an incredible role. They were a crucial voice on the other side, constantly reminding the Fed of its legal mandate to promote full employment. Fed Up had important allies in this effort, most importantly former Fed chair Janet Yellen, but it is likely that Yellen and her allies on the FOMC would have been forced to raise rates sooner and faster if not for pressure from Fed Up.

Read the full article here.