Cash Bail Fuels the Prison Industrial Complex. But We Can Stop It.
Cash Bail Fuels the Prison Industrial Complex. But We Can Stop It.
From 2015 to 2018, the homeless population in Los Angeles rose from less than 29,000 to 59,000. Many of those homeless...
From 2015 to 2018, the homeless population in Los Angeles rose from less than 29,000 to 59,000. Many of those homeless Angelenos were formerly incarcerated, and many will again be incarcerated for being homeless. Yet, according to the Center for Popular Democracy’s “Freedom to Thrive” report, Los Angeles spends 25.7% of its general fund budget on policing compared to a mere 3 percent to support nondepartmental “General City Purposes,” which includes city council spending on jobs, youth, homeless services, and substance abuse programs.
Read the full article here.
Twin Cities Commute Times Show Sizable Racial Gap
Next City - 05.14.2015 - Commute times for people of color in the Twin Cities are, on average, much longer than for...
Next City - 05.14.2015 - Commute times for people of color in the Twin Cities are, on average, much longer than for white commuters.
A new study found that in Minneapolis and St. Paul, African-American, Latino and Asian commuters were at least three times more likely to take public transit to work than whites, and TV news outlet KARE11 reports that researchers studied the transit time penalty for different ethnic groups in the Twin Cities, in other words how much time they lost in transit compared to making the same commutes in private vehicles. For African-Americans and Asian-Americans, it added up to three and a half weeks per year. For Latinos the time penalty was 4.5 weeks.
“… if you’re an African-American, you’re losing the equivalent of a month’s worth of your life commuting on a bus versus if you were able to take a car. If you’re a Latino it’s close to five weeks,” Anthony Newby of Neighborhoods Organizing for Change explained.
The impact of a lengthy commute goes far beyond stress or inconvenience. As a New York Times article about an ongoing Harvard study recently noted, “commuting time has emerged as the single strongest factor in the odds of escaping poverty. The longer an average commute in a given county, the worse the chances of low-income families there moving up the ladder.”
One of the problems the Twin Cities study found is that funding for public transit has been stagnant for years, while ridership increased 14 percent. According to the study:
The transportation funding plan proposed in the House Republican transportation omnibus bill relies on shifting about $1 billion of revenues from the general fund over the next four years to fund road and bridge construction. In the meantime, the House plan would result in a 25 percent cut in transit service — resulting in longer waits, more delays, longer travel times, lost service, and more crowded buses and trains. Decreased service will lead riders to look for more reliable means of transportation; with fewer riders, fare revenues will decline. This vicious cycle will result in longer waits and travel times, more delays, and fewer useful routes. These draconian cuts could endanger federal funding for future projects important to the Twin Cities region and result in legal violations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
Minneapolis and St. Paul are not alone in their transit-funding woes. In New York City, which already boasts the nation’s longest commute times, the trip to work is much worse for low-wage workers.
“We’ve heard so much about the achievement gap in education in our community. There is a transportation achievement gap!” Minneapolis Rep. Frank Hornstein, the ranking Democrat on the House Transportation Committee, said at a press event on Tuesday. “We cannot achieve a quality of life for too many people in our community because of this transit disparity that exists.”
Source: Next City
A not-so-welcome home Ninguna Bienvenida
A not-so-welcome home Ninguna Bienvenida
Theirs was not a welcome wagon. Instead, scores of protestors gathered outside of the Trump Tower offices and elsewhere...
Theirs was not a welcome wagon.
Instead, scores of protestors gathered outside of the Trump Tower offices and elsewhere in Manhattan to mark the President’s first visit to his hometown since his inauguration.On May 5, hundreds of demonstrators assembled at DeWitt Clinton Park in Hell’s Kitchen to rail against President Donald Trump’s policies, including his stance on immigration and efforts to repeal Obamacare.
Led by the Working Families Party, the rally featured a series of speeches by activists, prior to the crowd marching several blocks south towards the U.S.S. Intrepid, where Trump was to speak that evening.
Read the full article here.
Urban leaders converge in Minneapolis to discuss 'blue city' agendas
Urban leaders converge in Minneapolis to discuss 'blue city' agendas
Leaders in progressive urban politics from around the country are converging in Minneapolis Friday to strategize on...
Leaders in progressive urban politics from around the country are converging in Minneapolis Friday to strategize on affordable housing, immigrant rights, criminal justice reform and other issues. The two-day conference, called the Local Progress Convening, promotes the development of “blue city” — or Democratic — political agendas, and will include panels of city-level politicians and organizers from Philadelphia, Denver and New York.
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Full-Time Hires Buck the Trend at Fast-Food, Retail Chains
Full-Time Hires Buck the Trend at Fast-Food, Retail Chains
EASTON, Pa.—The orders came in fast during a recent Friday lunchtime rush at a Sheetz Inc. convenience store here....
EASTON, Pa.—The orders came in fast during a recent Friday lunchtime rush at a Sheetz Inc. convenience store here. Behind the counter, Alexis Cooper layered tomatoes on two sandwiches, refilled a container of onions and swirled a peanut-butter milkshake.
Six weeks into her job at Sheetz, Ms. Cooper easily distinguishes the beep of the deep fryer from the boop of the convenience store’s order-taking system and knows to have a pepperoni roll ready for a regular who shows up around noon.
Ms. Cooper, 20 years old, is something of a rarity in the realm of fast-food and retail work: a full-time employee.
At a time when many chains are shifting workers to part-time, the Altoona, Pa.-based Sheetz is making a big bet on full-time hires, who now comprise 53% of the company’s 17,000-person workforce. Leaders at the convenience store-and-gas-station chain say having full-time workers behind the register results in better customer service, lower turnover and a more engaged workforce—all of which, executives say, will lead to higher sales and profits.
Nearly 5.7 million workers said they were working part-time last year because they couldn’t get more hours or find full-time work, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics survey data. About 65% of store employees in the retail sector work part-time, according to an analysis by search and consulting firm Korn Ferry Hay Group. Companies reason that keeping staff to 30 hours or fewer a week curbs labor costs and allows firms to act nimbly, adjusting staffing to match customer demand.
Sheetz, and others like beauty retailer Bluemercury Inc., acknowledge that full-timers might cost more at first, but say they are more reliable—27% of full-time hourly workers leave their jobs per year, versus 68.7% of part-timers, according to the Korn Ferry report. Lower employee turnover saves on training and hiring costs, those employers say, and some report their customers spend more when full-timers take orders and ring up purchases.
“This is a moment where some employers at least are taking stock of whether they’ve gone down the labor flexibility path a little too far,” says Susan Lambert, a University of Chicago professor who studies hourly work.
Full-time workers are the “glue” that holds businesses together, Ms. Lambert’s research has found. They help coordinate tasks and anticipate business needs, and are often more committed. These employees are more likely to go the extra mile on the job, such as tracking down an item online for a customer.
For customers, a full-time employee “gives them the same face every day. It builds a different feeling than the robot behind the counter,” says Sheetz Chief Executive Joe Sheetz.
On employee surveys, Sheetz’s full-time workers tend to report more commitment and willingness to put in extra effort than part-timers do. That engagement correlates with higher customer-service marks, says Stephanie Doliveira, Sheetz’s human-resources vice president.
Less than a quarter of Sheetz’s full-time staff leaves each year; for part-timers, 83% leave. Overall voluntary turnover at the company is down two percentage points from last year, saving $925,000 in recruiting and training, Ms. Doliveira says. Starting sales associates make $9 to $11 per hour and are eligible for paid time off; those working more than 30 hours per week get access to health insurance.
At Buffalo Wings & Rings, a restaurant with 50 locations in the U.S., full-timers ring up 6% higher sales per hour on average and have far lower rates of absenteeism than part-timers do, according to CEO Nader Masadeh. The eatery has doubled its share of full-time workers since 2013, with about 37% of employees working full-time. The company’s training costs have fallen 25% as a result, according to Mr. Masadeh.
Churn among part-time workers prompted &pizza, a 14-store chain in the Washington, D.C., area, to halt new restaurant openings for a while, says CEO Michael Lastoria. Managers noticed that customers gave low ratings to new stores where inexperienced, often part-time, workers comprised 95% of staff. Some 31% of &pizza staff now workfull-time, up from 15% in 2014, and the chain is set to open seven additional stores this year, Mr. Lastoria says.
Having more full-time workers requires managers to adjust. Sheetz’s store managers initially resisted adding more full-timers when the company launched the initiative in the summer of 2014, Ms. Doliveira says. Used to having a big bench of part-time workers to call upon, they worried about being caught short when employees called in sick. Managers are also figuring out how to plan shifts now that more workers have vacation time.
Moving to full-time has come with health insurance and an extra $50 or so each week for Tammy Shepard, a salesperson at a Sheetz in Statesville, N.C. “It gives you a sense of security, which is a huge thing,” she says.
Full-time private industry workers make $25.44 an hour in wages and salaries, as compared with $13.29 for part-time workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“There’s a real penalty that workers pay for working part-time,” says Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at left-leaning advocacy group Center for Popular Democracy.
The promise of a 40-hour work week was what spurred Ms. Cooper to apply to Sheetz, though she holds down another part-time job managing a nearby pub. Logging just 14 hours a week there has made it tricky to stay on top of everything, such as the new beers on the menu.
“It stinks when you don’t know certain things,” she says.
By RACHEL FEINTZEIG
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NY Daily News Letter to the Editor: Body Count
New York Daily News - April 15, 2014, by Josie Duffy - Re “Hardhat in fatal plunge” (April 15): How many more deadly...
New York Daily News - April 15, 2014, by Josie Duffy - Re “Hardhat in fatal plunge” (April 15): How many more deadly accidents have to happen before the construction and insurance industries drop their campaign to weaken workplace safety laws? In the past month alone, there have been two fatal construction accidents in Midtown, underscoring the dire need to protect and expand worker safety rules, especially the Scaffold Law. Instead, construction and insurance companies are pouring money into a high-priced campaign to convince Albany to weaken common-sense safety rules that hold building owners and contractors responsible if their safety lapses lead to injuries or deaths. Weakening the law would make dangerous jobs more deadly, especially for immigrant and Latino workers who, studies show, are more likely get hurt on the job. The latest construction deaths should end this debate. Source
Martin Luther King, institutions and power
Martin Luther King, institutions and power
Jared Bernstein, a former chief economist to Vice President Biden, is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and...
Jared Bernstein, a former chief economist to Vice President Biden, is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and author of the new book 'The Reconnection Agenda: Reuniting Growth and Prosperity.'
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gestures during a speech at a Chicago Freedom Movement rally at Soldier Field in Chicago on July 10, 1966. (Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images)
When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, he was in Memphis, supporting striking sanitation workers. By that time in his crusade for racial justice, he had elevated full employment to a key plank in his platform. The full name of the March on Washington was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. A common placard held up that day read, “Civil Rights Plus Full Employment Equals Freedom,” a powerful economic equation indeed.
In my experience, too few people remember this aspect of King’s movement, instead emphasizing his stirring spiritual commitment to racial inclusion. But King was of course thoroughly versed in the reality of the institutional barriers blocking blacks and his unique genius was to combine deep spiritual awareness with an equally deep understanding of the role of power in economic outcomes. That’s one reason he was in Memphis, supporting the union.
In 1967, King called for “a radical redistribution of economic and political power.” He particularly understood the power, for better or worse, of American institutions, most notably of course, the institution of racism, which so successfully blocked African Americans from decent homes, jobs, schools and opportunities.
But countervailing institutions existed within his vision as well, including the church and the union, and, if it could be forced to live up to its promise, the government. Even the institutions of the consumer economy and the job market could, with the right force and strategy, including boycotts that flexed black consumer muscle and equal opportunity laws, be nudged in the direction of racial justice.
To some readers, this “institutional” framework may be confusing. What do I mean by referencing the consumer or job markets or racism or unions, as “institutions”? This certainly doesn’t square with the classic economic explanation of how the economy works: profit-maximizing individuals achieving optimal social welfare by each individual pursuing their goals.
The institutional framework, with its emphasis on historical, legal and cultural practices (norms) embedded in economic systems, stands in stark contrast to the market forces framework. Surely no one could question whether the legal system or the housing market black people faced in King’s time, not to mention our own, promoted objective, blind justice. Discrimination in schools, the economy, and almost every other walk of life could not and cannot possibly be viewed as a fair or merit-based system.
Honoring King’s vision and legacy thus requires not simply remembering his most well-known dream: a racially inclusive society very different from the one that existed in his, or sadly, our own time. It requires recognizing the need to redistribute the power from the oppressive, exclusionary institutions, many of the same ones — housing, schools, criminal justice, the economy — he fought for until the day he was taken from us.
What does honoring that vision mean today?
Although I certainly don’t advocate giving up on President-elect Donald Trump’s administration before it has started, all signs suggest that it and the Republican-led Congress will hurt, not help, the economically less advantaged. Republican budgets threaten to undermine the safety net, Trump’s proposed tax policy squanders fiscal resources on tax cuts for the rich, undermining opportunities for those stuck in places without adequate educational or employment opportunities. There’s talk among Republicans of trying to get more states to pass “right to work” laws that undermine unions and cut workers’ pay. Listening to Ben Carson’s hearing for secretary of housing and urban development quickly disabuses one of hope that he’ll tackle the legacy of segregated housing that remains a serious problem. As far as reforming the institutionalized racism the remains embedded in our criminal justice and policing systems, again, it’s awfully hard to be hopeful.
There are, however, many levels of institutional norms, laws and practices. The Fight for Fifteen has been immensely successful in raising minimum wages at the state and sub-state levels. I can’t prove this, but I’d bet that without Black Lives Matter, there would be no “blistering report” from the Justice Department on the racial practices of the Chicago Police Department. The activist group “Fed Up” has had great success elevating the issue of economic justice as regards Federal Reserve policy, a policy area that even liberal presidents have avoided getting into.
As I recently wrote regarding “ban the box,” a policy designed to give job-seekers with criminal records a fairer shot at employment:
Nineteen states and over 100 cities and counties have already taken similar action for government employees, and seven states (Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon and Rhode Island) plus Washington, DC and 26 cities and counties have extended ban the box policies to cover private employers. Some private businesses, including Walmart, Koch Industries, Target, Starbucks, Home Depot, and Bed, Bath & Beyond, have also adopted these policies on their own.
This last part about the private businesses is instructive. The Selma bus boycott was, of course, in no small part an economic action: Black people would not pay for discrimination. Regarding full employment, King realized that at high levels of unemployment, it’s costless to discriminate against a significant swath of potential workers. But when the job market tightens up, discriminating against a needed worker means leaving profit on the table.
Especially in the age of Trump, when so many Americans feel as if representative democracy is seriously on the ropes, it seems a no-brainer to channel King and once again tap the power of boycotts and leaning on businesses to do the right thing. It makes no sense at all to cede this field to Trump as he nonsensically claims (and gets) credit for job creation that already was happening.
My intuition is that many businesses, as in the ban-the-box example, would be willing to help push back on the institutional injustices that persist. Higher and more equal pay scales, implementation of the updated, higher overtime threshold that was wrongly blocked by a Texas judge (in fact, many businesses, to their credit, have gone ahead with this change), not blocking collective bargaining if their workers want to exercise that right, flexible scheduling policies that help parents balance work and family — there’s no reason for progressives not to fight for these ideas at the sub-national level and the private sector.
Although these sub-national fights are more likely where the action is for the next few years, meaningful action is developing at the national level as well. King would have easily recognized the Trump phenomenon as the work of exclusive institutions once again grabbing the power and would have organized accordingly and effectively. As we speak, many of us are trying to block the repeal of health-care reform in this spirit. The Indivisible Movement and the Women’s March would also have been highly familiar to Dr. King.
But on whatever level or in whatever sector the fight takes place, as we celebrate King’s indelible contributions, let us recall his understanding of power, the institutions that power supported and his admonitions to us not to rest until much more of that power lies in the hands of those who still command far too little of it.
By Jared Bernstein
Source
The Stock Market Swings Tell You Everything You Need To Know About Our Rigged Economy
The Stock Market Swings Tell You Everything You Need To Know About Our Rigged Economy
Political activism on the left around monetary policy doesn’t have much infrastructure, but the Center for Popular...
Political activism on the left around monetary policy doesn’t have much infrastructure, but the Center for Popular Democracy, through a group called the Fed Up Campaign, has begun to change that.
Read the full article here.
Barkin Tapped as Next President of Richmond Fed Bank
Barkin Tapped as Next President of Richmond Fed Bank
The Federal Reserve's Richmond regional bank announced on Monday that Thomas Barkin, a senior executive at global...
The Federal Reserve's Richmond regional bank announced on Monday that Thomas Barkin, a senior executive at global management consulting firm McKinsey & Co., will be the bank's next president.
He will succeed Jeffrey Lacker, who resigned as the bank's president in April after revealing his involvement in a leak of confidential information in 2012 that had triggered congressional and FBI investigations.
Read the full article here.
The Fed’s “Hammer” Can Be Used to Great Effect to Improve Prospects for Minority Workers
Economic Policy Institute Blog - March 4, 2015, by Josh Bivens - Update: Binyamin Appelbaum has made a useful change to...
Economic Policy Institute Blog - March 4, 2015, by Josh Bivens - Update: Binyamin Appelbaum has made a useful change to his article that I comment on below, noting that Black workers do indeed stand to benefit disproportionately from any demand boost that keeps overall unemployment rates falling in coming years. Again, however, I think that while he makes an important point, it still doesn’t strike me as right to frame it as about the limits of monetary policy. His point (as I read it) is that the gap in unemployment rates between Black and White workers is an economic problem that policymakers should seek to end, but this end-goal of no racial unemployment gap at all cannot be achieved with any single policy lever.
But while an expansionary monetary policy is not a sufficient condition to erase the racial unemployment gap, it is a necessary condition. That is, the first step towards tearing down racial bias in hiring is to rob employers of the economic power they can use to indulge this bias. And the best way to rob them of this economic power is to have tight labor markets that force employers to compete to hire workers. So, macroeconomic policy (which is dominated by the Federal Reserve) is just crucial to meeting the long-run goal of ending racial unemployment gaps.
Finally, while the existence of a racial unemployment gap in both good and bad times is a terrible problem, it’s an even bigger problem when the respective White and Black unemployment rates are 5.3 and 11.3 percent (like they were in 2014) than when they are 3.5 and 7.6 percent (like they were in 2000). So while ending the racial unemployment gap entirely should be the long-game, we also need to be keenly aware of what can alleviate economic pain in the short run. And that short-run is just dominated by what the Fed decides to do.
Simply put, the most effective policy lever to reduce the black unemployment rate in the next few years is for the Fed to keep its foot off the economic brakes by keeping short-term interest rates low until we see real signs of healthy wage growth for American workers.
Binyamin Appelbaum gets one deeply wrong in the New York Times, riffing off a report released by the Center for Popular Democracy with (full disclosure) data assistance from EPI and concludes with a version of the old saying that the Fed’s “hammer” can’t effectively address non-nail problems like excessive unemployment.
Appelbaum notes that the report shows that Black unemployment rates are significantly higher than White (or overall) unemployment rates in both recessions and recoveries. Fair enough. And if his conclusions had simply been that because the gap persists in both booms and busts that monetary policy alone cannot completely erase these unemployment gaps, that would also have been fair enough.
But instead he pushed this idea way too far, and ended getting something completely wrong. In his words (brackets and emphasis added by me):
“The same factors [that keep unemployment rates higher for Black workers in both good times and bad] help to explain why black workers are quicker to lose jobs and slower to return to work. Any given level of economic stimulus, as a result, helps black workers less than it helps white workers.”
This is totally backwards. Because Black unemployment is almost exactly double White unemployment in both recessions and booms, this means that Black workers are indeed “quicker to lose jobs” during recoveries, but they are actually faster, not “slower” to return to work. And any given level of economic stimulus reduces Black unemployment by twice as many percentage points as it reduces White unemployment, helping Black workers more than it helps White workers. In short, as the CPD report shows, the stakes regarding at what pace the economy improves and overall unemployment falls are highest for Black workers. And this means that the stakes regarding Fed decisions are highest for Black workers.
He also notes, “And it follows that the level of stimulus necessary to reduce excessive black unemployment may well be excessive for the economy as a whole.”
Maybe, though lots depends on both instances of “excessive” in that sentence. Regarding current debates over the Fed (ie, what they do in the next 6-12 months) we know that current Black unemployment is indeed “excessive” and we also know that it will be significantly reduced (at twice the pace of the overall rate!) the longer the Fed allows the recovery to proceed without braking it by raising interest rates.
And worries about “excessive” overall aggregate demand growth and monetary stimulus are still completely theoretical. This demand growth can be labeled “excessive” with respect to the Fed’s 2 percent inflation target only when there is a sustained period of wage-growth that is about double its current pace (which really hasn’t picked up since the recession’s trough).
The late 1990s offers a good reminder on both these points. First, when overall unemployment fell far enough to average just over 4 percent for two full years in 1999 and 2000, Black unemployment fell to levels (7.0 percent for a month, and below 8 percent for a majority of months in 1999 and 2000)) far lower than the 11.3 percent it averaged during 2014. And there was no evidence from that earlier period that these levels of overall unemployment and demand-growth were excessive – inflation actually fell in the late 90s, even as wages rose across-the-board.
What CPD and EPI (and others) are calling for when they ask the Fed to keep its foot off of the economic brakes in the name of helping the lot of the most vulnerable workers is precisely to probe the limits of excessive stimulus. That is, the Fed should be much more willing to experiment with very low rates of unemployment even if it risks a period of above-average inflation. If the Fed pursued this it would do more to help the most vulnerable workers than nearly any other single policy. So in this regard, the economic health of minority communities is one problem that the Fed’s policy hammer is very well designed to help.
Source
3 days ago
3 days ago