The Fed Just Inched Closer To Raising Interest Rates
The Federal Reserve announced on Wednesday that it will keep interest rates at or near zero for now, but implied it...
The Federal Reserve announced on Wednesday that it will keep interest rates at or near zero for now, but implied it would soon raise them, alarming left-leaning activists and economists concerned about stagnant wages.
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which is the central bank’s body responsible for managing key interest rates, said in a statement that its decision was based on the conclusion that interest rates of zero to 0.25 percent -- known as the “zero lower bound” -- were still needed to “support continued progress toward maximum employment and price stability.” The statement refers to the Fed’s dual mandate to both pursue full employment and keep inflation low through its control of the money supply.
The FOMC said that inflation in particular continues to remain too low to warrant an interest rate hike.
“Inflation continued to run below the Committee's longer-run objective, partly reflecting earlier declines in energy prices and decreasing prices of non-energy imports,” the committee said in the statement.
However, the Fed also indicated in its statement that it is optimistic about the pace of economic growth, buoying expectations of a rate hike in September when the FOMC meets next. Many analysts have been predicting that the Fed would raise rates as soon as September, or at least before the year’s end.
The FOMC statement noted that “economic activity has been expanding moderately in recent months. The labor market continued to improve, with solid job gains and declining unemployment.”
The Fed has kept the primary interest rate it controls near zero since December 2008.
Many activists and economists, including the left-leaning nonprofit Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up campaign, believe that the Fed has prioritized the inflation half of its dual mandate at the expense of full employment. They argue against raising rates before unemployment gets low enough for employers to raise wages. And they are especially considered that unemployment rates remain disproportionately high in communities of color.
The Fed Up campaign was pleased that the Fed did not raise rates on Wednesday, but called the lack of a rate hike a “low bar,” since it was not even expected by most observers. Instead, the campaign emphasized its frustration with the FOMC statement for ignoring signs of slack in the job market.
“The FOMC statement hails ‘solid job gains,’ but does not mention that the most recent job figures showed a slowdown in wages,” said Jordan Haedtler, deputy campaign manager for Fed Up. “The downward trend in wages is a major reason why the Fed should not raise interest rates in 2015.”
Source: Huffington Post
Progressive groups target Julián Castro
Progressive groups target Julián Castro
The veepstakes oppo war has begun. With Bernie Sanders’ durability exciting progressives at their potential to shape...
The veepstakes oppo war has begun.
With Bernie Sanders’ durability exciting progressives at their potential to shape the Democratic race, a coalition of groups — many of them backers of the Vermont senator — are launching a preemptive strike against Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, aimed at disqualifying him from consideration to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate.
Tuesday morning, the group emailed petitions to several million people attacking Castro on the relatively obscure issue of his handling of mortgage sales and launching a website with an unsubtle address: DontSellOurHomesToWallStreet.org.
They’re just as open with their political aims: to publicly discredit Castro as a progressive, latching onto the mortgage issue to seed enough suspicion to keep him off Clinton’s shortlist.
“It’s a situation where the Clinton campaign wants Castro to be a major asset to her chances of winning the White House, and unless he changes his position related to foreclosures and loans, he’ll be a toxic asset to the Clinton campaign,” said Matt Nelson, the managing director for Presente.org, the nation’s largest Latino organizing group that focuses on social justice.
“All year, we’ve seen the candidates tripping over themselves to show how tough they’ll be on Wall Street,” said Kurt Walters, the campaign manager for Root Strikers, a 501(c4) group of Demand Progress and its 2 million affiliated activists, who is planning to deliver the petitions to Castro’s office when they’re ready. “Then to turn around and take a step backwards on that exact question, and put someone who has been doing the exact opposite — I think it would be tough for a lot of people who care about Wall Street accountability to get excited about that pick.”
By the coalition’s calculations, HUD under Castro has sold 98 percent of the long-delinquent mortgages it acquired through a program aimed at preventing foreclosures to Wall Street banks under Castro’s watch, without anywhere near the number of needed strings attached. (HUD says that figure is way off.) And Nelson and Walters say that for a politician who’s aiming to be considered the vice presidential prospect for both progressives and minorities, Castro has done too much to help private equity firms like Blackstone, instead of black and Latino communities.
“If Secretary Castro fails to create significant momentum in terms of stopping the sale of mortgages to Wall Street, then I do think it disqualifies him. But there’s time left on the clock,” said Jonathan Westin, the director of New York Communities for Change, which was formed out of the remains of the community activist group ACORN. “I think a lot of the progressive movement would not be in support of a Castro ticket if he fails to make traction here.”
The 41-year-old Castro is seen by many as the perfect balance to Clinton — younger and Latino, with a history as mayor of San Antonio and now two years in the Obama administration, handsome and with a 2012 convention keynote speech that immediately made him a rising star to watch in the party. And people close to him say he’s a proven progressive across the board.
“Castro has a strong record at HUD fighting on behalf of progressive issues including protecting those with criminal records, standing up for LGBT rights and advocating for more inclusive communities through affirmatively furthering fair housing,” said one person close to the secretary.
But Maurice Weeks, an Atlanta-based organizer who works on housing justice in communities of color for the Center for Popular Democracy/CPD Action, said that Castro’s lack of action at HUD is breeding more gentrification and suffering in a way that should make blacks and Latinos pay attention.
“What I wouldn’t be excited about is any candidate, not just Julián, who is looking to further some of these practices,” Weeks said.
At issue is the Distressed Asset Stabilization Program, started in 2010 to allow mortgages going toward foreclosure to be sold to what HUD calls “qualified bidders and encourages them to work with borrowers to help bring the loan out of default.”
The progressives attacking Castro say they believe the mortgages should be sold instead to nonprofits and other institutions that would care more about the communities involved. What Castro’s done, they say, has essentially amounted to a fire sale for Wall Street firms.
Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and one of Sanders’ few endorsers in Congress, complained about the program to Castro last week in a letter obtained by Politico.
“Your own Distressed Asset Stabilization Program, which was designed to help right the wrongs of the meltdown years, has been selling homes that once belonged to the families I’ve spoken with at rock-bottom prices to the Wall Street entities that created this situation in the first place,” Grijalva wrote.
HUD says that Castro has continued to meet with advocates, in the hopes of improving the policy, and points to several changes that have been made — including those that have increased the number of mortgages sold to nonprofits. An official pointed to changes made a year ago that, among other things, now require servicers buying loans to delay foreclosure for a year.
“Providing an option for homeowners to remain in their homes is one of the reasons the DASP program was created” said a HUD spokesperson. “We’ve received feedback from stakeholders which has led us to make a number of important changes to the program including the creation of nonprofit-only pools and delaying foreclosure for a year. Additionally, we are still evaluating further enhancements to the program to meet our core mission.”
But that’s not enough for the groups joining the coalition to attack Castro. Those include the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) Action, American Family Voices, Color of Change, Courage Campaign, CPD Action, Daily Kos, MoveOn, New York Communities for Change, Other 98%, Presente, RootsAction, Rootstrikers and the Working Families Party.
With the exception of the Working Families Party, which is backing Sanders, the groups have not formally endorsed a candidate in the presidential primaries.
Most conversations about Clinton’s prospective pick center on Castro and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), and the secretary’s ambitions to be the vice presidential nominee are well known.
But among progressives, so are the suspicions about his bona fides. The red banner across the website proclaiming “TELL HUD SECRETARY JULIAN CASTRO: STOP SELLING OUR NEIGHBORHOODS TO WALL STREET!” amounts to the opening salvo in doing something about it.
“There’s a lot of hope around him,” said Brandi Collins, campaign director for the 1.2-million member Color of Change, who said she was one of the people excited by the possibilities opened up by his keynote speech.
Collins said this complaint about Castro’s leadership is reflective of a whole range of issues her organization has had with what members say is the secretary’s closeness to Wall Street and lack of attention to black and brown communities.
“If he’s not showing up for our communities while the cameras aren’t there, we don’t know that he’ll show up when he’s on his way to the White House,” Collins said.
According to Julia Gordon, formerly at the Center for American Progress and currently an executive vice president at the National Community Stabilization Trust, the coalition may have a point — if only because it is taking advantage of opaque accounting at HUD. Gordon said she’s met often with HUD about these issues but hasn’t seen the kind of progress she’d like or evidence that the program matches the claims that officials make.
“We know it’s been good for investors. According to HUD, it’s been good for the fund, although the level of detail that they release to account for it is minimal. We really don’t know how good it’s been for the homeowners, and that’s where this wave of protests is coming from,” Gordon said.
Laurie Goodman, the director of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute, said that the people who are attacking Castro for selling the loans to Wall Street are misinterpreting the pragmatic realities about what’s in play.
The mortgages in question tend to be delinquent for over two years, she said, and getting them out of HUD with its limited resources and tools to deal with them is a positive step for homeowners. Only big banks can take on mortgages like that, she argued, making the nonprofit issue moot.
“The only way to help these borrowers is to sell the loans. You don’t have any other buyers big enough in size,” she said. “Even if you wanted to do something different, you couldn’t.”
Within that, though, Goodman credited HUD under Castro for making “some really big improvements.”
Not nearly enough, according to Gordon.
“Both HUD and [the Federal Housing Finance Agency] have let down communities by not focusing on what they want the buyer to do with these,” Gordon said, arguing that they’ve been focused instead on offloading the debt. “They’re just like, ‘Get it away from me.’”
The idea that Castro would be the first Latino on a national ticket means something, Nelson said, though he argued that this only adds to the burden for the secretary to show leadership on the mortgage issue in the way progressives want at this moment of added attention to their concerns.
Nelson said that at Presente, they think of it like a parable — it doesn’t make it any better to be hurt if the hurt is coming from one of their own.
There are two trees in a forest, Nelson said, and they see an ax coming to chop them down. “Don’t worry,” says one tree to the other, “the handle’s one of us.”
“Basically,” Nelson said, “we’re fighting to make sure Castro isn’t the handle.”
By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE
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Group in Allentown rallies for immigration reform
The Morning Call - April 6, 2013 - ...
The Morning Call - April 6, 2013 - Whitehall Township resident Belkys Luvon doesn't expect all of America's undocumented immigrants to be granted U.S. citizenship overnight. That's not what she and other advocates of comprehensive reform of the country's immigration laws are lobbying for — or even what they'd want.
But Luvon, who said she came to the United States legally from the Dominican Republic 29 years ago, feels it only fair that undocumented immigrants be offered legal means of gaining citizenship.
Basically, what proponents call "a path to citizenship" should be for those who have lived here, abided by the law, worked hard, raised families and otherwise contributed to the well-being of countless communities, Luvon said.
She and other Lehigh Valley residents, as well as organizers from other areas, staged a public rally for immigration reform Saturday at Allentown's Cedar Creek Park. Only a few dozen people were on hand in the early going — the event got off to a late start — but support for the cause regionally, as well as nationally, is strong, according to Tony Perlstein of the Center for Popular Democracy inWashington, D.C., which supports reform.
In addition to the event in Allentown, "speak outs" for reform were scheduled in Norristown and other parts of Pennsylvania, and across the country, Perlstein said.
Luzon — who operates a consulting business helping immigrants attain citizenship, as well as with preparing income tax returns and starting businesses of their own — said she wants more people, regardless of status, to have the kind of opportunity granted to her.
"I consider myself lucky, thank God," she said, having followed her mother to America. "I believe it is fair, after living here and working hard" — and staying out of trouble with the law, she stressed — for people to have a path to citizenship as envisioned by PresidentBarack Obama, Luzon said.
Luzon objects to the term "illegal immigrants."
"No human being is illegal," she said.
Reform supporter Erika Sutherland, a Muhlenberg Collegeprofessor, said she hopes for a comprehensive package of reforms that streamlines existing programs for attaining citizenship and gives people a way to get on the path toward citizenship.
Among the goals, she said, is "an equitable comprehensive citizenship" for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants, the vast majority of whom are "people contributing to our community and [who] want nothing more than the ability to stay and work."
"We are a nation of immigrants," Sutherland concluded. "We can do better."
With a group of Republican and Democratic senators working on comprehensive reform, the Center for Popular Democracy expects tens of thousands of supporters at a demonstration Wednesday in Washington in favor of reform, Perlstein said.
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New Report Alleges $30 Million in Fraud and Abuse Connected to PA Charter Schools
NEA - October 1, 2014, by Brian Washington - A new...
NEA - October 1, 2014, by Brian Washington - A new report charges that Pennsylvania charter school operators have engaged in fraud and abuse amounting to about $30 million.
It was released today by several non-profit groups including the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), Integrity in Education, and ACTION United. The report is called, Fraud and Financial Mismanagement in Pennsylvania’s Charter Schools.
The report claims that within the past 17 years, charter school operators in Pennsylvania have abused the system of at least $30 million. It also asserts that state agencies, charged with overseeing charter schools, are not up to the job of weeding out fraud and abuse.
While the state has a complex, multi-layered system of oversight of the charter system, this history of financial fraud makes clear that the systems are clearly not up to the task of effectively detecting or preventing fraud. Indeed, the vast majority of fraud was uncovered by whistleblowers and media exposées, not by the state’s oversight agencies.
More than 2 million students attend approximately 6,000 charter schools nationwide. Charter schools were originally intended to serve as centers of innovation that spawn new and improved approaches to teaching and learning that could later be shared with traditional public schools. However, critics charge the rapid expansion of the charter school industry has led to problems concerning oversight, accountability, wasteful spending, and fraud.
In May, CPD released a whistleblowing report called, “Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud, and Abuse.” That report alleges that waste and abuse linked to charter schools nationwide has cost taxpayers an estimated $100 million.
In addition, the Annenberg Institute at Brown University released a report this month calling for higher standards for charter schools regarding accountability, transparency, and equity.
In a statement released today, Lily Eskelsen García, president of the NEA, representing more than 3 million educators nationwide, said it’s time for lawmakers to demand more oversight and accountability from charter operators.
“We’re referring to the same politicians who call for ‘public school accountability’ by piling toxic tests on our students, yet seem to look the other way when it’s time to hold all charter schools responsible for their use of public funds,” said Eskelsen García, a Utah educator.
Meanwhile, despite all the issues surrounding charter schools, in the city of York, an appointee of Governor Tom Corbett who is charged with overseeing the city’s finances, has been linked to a controversial plan to turn every public school into a for-profit charter school. The proposal has sparked public protests involving students, educators, parents, and community leaders, who are all urging York school board members not to do it.
Protesters charge David Meckley is lobbying city school board members to adopt the controversial plan before the November elections. They say it’s because Corbett, who supports the corporate takeover of public education, is way down in the polls and not expected to win re-election.
“Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett and other politicians in the state continue to push for privatization, despite compelling evidence of fraud and abuse of taxpayer funds in the charter school industry,” said Eskelsen García. “The CPD report and a recent Annenberg study call for more oversight of the charter schools. Students deserve protection from those fly-by-night charter school operators who are more focused on making money than ensuring that our students receive a quality education.”
Click here to get the latest information on the issues that impact students, parents, educators, and our public schools.
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CPD's Connie Razza Joins MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry to Discuss the Strength of the Dollar
Melissa Harris-Perry - March 22, 2015 - How does the strength or weakness of the dollar affect average Americans?...
Melissa Harris-Perry - March 22, 2015 - How does the strength or weakness of the dollar affect average Americans? Joshua Steiner and CPD's Director of Strategic Research Connie Razza join to discuss.
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Las ciudades advierten a las empresas que no cooperen con Trump
Las ciudades advierten a las empresas que no cooperen con Trump
Las ciudades han sido los principales puntos de resistencia contra la política de Donald Trump, en particular sus...
Las ciudades han sido los principales puntos de resistencia contra la política de Donald Trump, en particular sus planes de tomar medidas contra los inmigrantes.
Las ciudades se han mantenido firmes y proclamado orgullosamente ser santuarios de inmigrantes ante las amenazas de la Casa Blanca de quitarles fondos federales. Han prometido apoyar el acuerdo de París sobre el clima después del sorpresivo anuncio de Trump de que Estados Unidos dejará de respaldar el histórico pacto.
Lea el artículo completo aquí.
Will Another White Big-Banker Oversee Wall Street?
Will Another White Big-Banker Oversee Wall Street?
“Fed Up, a coalition of community and labor groups, argues in a new report that this homogeneity creates blind spots,...
“Fed Up, a coalition of community and labor groups, argues in a new report that this homogeneity creates blind spots, protecting financial institutions while neglecting those who are still struggling 10 years after the financial crisis struck. Fed Up was formed to highlight how central bankers neglect corners of the economy. Though the Fed is supposed to be independent of politics, its decisions affect everyone, especially vulnerable populations who need support. An economy run for banks, inattentive to black and brown families, will necessarily expand the wide wealth and income gaps. The New York Fed’s district also includes Puerto Rico, which is especially struggling of late.”
Read the full article here.
May Day rallies across U.S. target Trump immigration policy
May Day rallies across U.S. target Trump immigration policy
Labor unions and civil rights groups staged May Day rallies in several U.S. cities on Monday to denounce President...
Labor unions and civil rights groups staged May Day rallies in several U.S. cities on Monday to denounce President Donald Trump's get-tough policy on immigration, a crackdown they said preys on vulnerable workers in some of America's lowest-paying jobs.
Protests and marches challenging Trump's efforts at stepping up the deportation of illegal immigrants drew crowds by the thousands to the streets of New York, Washington, Los Angeles and San Francisco, with smaller gatherings popping up across the country.
Read full article here.
Are Scheduling Bills Like D.C.'s Helpful or Meddlesome?
The District of Columbia Council scheduled a hearing for Jan. 13 on a bill that would require stores and restaurants to...
The District of Columbia Council scheduled a hearing for Jan. 13 on a bill that would require stores and restaurants to tell employees what their work schedules will be several weeks in advance and require employers to compensate employees for last-minute schedule changes.
“This movement is under way across this country,” lead sponsor Vincent Orange Jr. (D-At Large) said when he introduced the measure Dec. 5. “San Francisco recently passed regulations to address this issue and bills have been introduced in seven states.”
The Hours and Scheduling Stability Act of 2015 wouldn't apply to all stores and restaurants, but it would have a big impact, Orange told Bloomberg BNA Dec. 17. If passed, the measure “will assist tremendously with providing [the district's] workforce and their families with certainty,” the councilmember said.
The bill would require employers to tell workers what their schedules will be at least three weeks in advance. A change in schedule less than three weeks out would require the employer to pay an extra hour of wages. Less than 24 hours' notice would require four hours of wages.
Orange's bill would cover any D.C. franchisee of a restaurant chain with at least 20 locations nationwide or a retail store chain with at least five.
Unpredicatability Affects Planning, Benefits Eligibility
It's hard enough for families to balance work and personal life, Orange said when he introduced the bill. “Having a schedule you can count on leads to a better work environment and better harmony in scheduling family obligations.”
Liz Ben-Ishai, senior policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy, which supports legislation requiring employers to provide workers with advance notice of schedules, told California lawmakers in March of 2015 that volatile schedules affect workers’ ability to arrange child care. Such volatility also interferes with their ability to hold second jobs and pursue education or training, she said.
There's another problem with unpredictable schedules, Ben-Ishai told Bloomberg BNA Dec. 22. Many public assistance programs ask participants to estimate their income or number of hours they will work, she said. “Because they have these erratic schedules or insufficient hours they can't predict how much they'll make,” she said.
Utah is “an example of a good approach,” she told Bloomberg BNA. State eligibility assessors use “professional judgment” to draw on multiple sources of information, including paychecks and conversations with employers regarding anticipated hours and overtime, to determine an applicant's’ eligibility, Ben-Ishai wrote in a policy brief. Utah encourages workers to follow up on information applicants provide that may not reflect their current eligibility, such as out-of-date wage information
Ben-Ishai also suggested a different time frame for evaluating applicants’ incomes and work hours. She pointed to the Child Care and Development Block Grant, which “requires a longer authorization period” and “accounts for fluctuation in people's hours.” This federally funded program allows states to determine eligibility “over a period of 12 months to provide a more realistic picture,” she said.
Bills Introduced Around the Country
The Washington, D.C., bill is one of several under consideration in state and local legislatures, as well as on the federal level. Within the past two years, there have been similar proposals in 13 other cities and states, plus one on the federal level.
San Francisco has been the first and, so far, only jurisdiction to pass a predictable scheduling law. It passed Nov. 25, 2014, by a 10-0 vote of the 11-member Board of Supervisors and became law without the signature of Mayor Ed Lee (D). Lee said he was “concerned about large numbers of impacted merchants who said there was little meaningful discussion” in the drafting of the law (243 DLR C-1, 12/18/14).
Lizzy Simmons, the National Retail Federation's senior director, government relations, told Bloomberg BNA Dec. 30 that the San Francisco law has a “carve-out that allows unions and their collective bargaining agreements to waive out” of its requirements. She said she's concerned that allowing employees to contractually waive the law's requirements grants outsize influence to labor organizations “since a lot of the unions have been behind” efforts to pass predictable scheduling laws.
The San Francisco law actually “takes away and impedes on employee flexibility,” Simmons said. Retail managers and employees should work together to come up with schedules that can accommodate individual needs, she said. “A one-size-fits-all government mandate” makes that harder to accomplish, she said.
Part of the problem with scheduling bills is that there's little guidance on how to implement them, said Robin Winchell Roberts, the federation's senior director, media relations. For example, the San Francisco law exempts employee-requested changes from triggering schedule change compensation, which Roberts calls “penalty pay.” The key factor in determining when an employer must pay schedule change compensation is who requests the change, Roberts said. It isn't clear whether it is due when a retailer requires an employee who can't work a scheduled shift to find a co-worker to work the shift in her place, Roberts said.
The compensation might also be triggered if business is better than expected, Simmons said. For example, a store might want to extend a sale that's going well. If the store wants to staff up to respond to the additional customer demand, it might incur unexpected expenses on account of employees who weren't scheduled, she told Bloomberg BNA. “I don't think you can just say after the fact sales made up for that,” she said when asked whether the unexpected increase in revenue would offset the unexpected increase in expenses.
Flexibility Essential, Industry Group Says
“Flexibility is a trademark of the restaurant industry,” Christin Fernandez, director of media relations and public affairs at the National Restaurant Association, told Bloomberg BNA by e-mail Dec. 23. Businesses operate around the clock “with business models unique to each restaurant,” she said.
Starbucks is an example of a business that pursued its own scheduling model. The company announced in August 2014 that it would voluntarily change its scheduling practices. It said it would provide employees with schedules a week in advance. It also said it would prohibit scheduling employees to close a store one night and return a few hours later to open the next morning (157 DLR A-6, 8/14/14).
But 11 months later, a report by the Center for Popular Democracy, an organization that describes itself as advocating for a “pro-worker” agenda, concluded that the company hasn’t kept its promises. The report, “The Grind: Striving for Scheduling Fairness at Starbucks,” drew on comments from a survey of employees who say back-to-back closing and opening shifts continue. Reached for comment Dec. 22, Brent Gow, global director for payroll at Starbucks, told Bloomberg BNA he couldn’t speak on the record because the company is still working on the issue.
Reporting Time Pay Laws Exist in Some States
Predictable scheduling laws don't take into account that “some of the people that go into these jobs to begin with do it for exactly the flexibility that's being challenged here,” said Diane Saunders, a shareholder in the Boston office of Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart P.C. who advises employers as co-chair of the firm's Retail Practice Group.
Saunders advises her clients to ensure that they comply with reporting time laws that are already on the books. In Washington, D.C., and eight states, employees are guaranteed a minimum number of hours of pay if they report to work but are sent home because business is unexpectedly slow, she wrote in a Novemberblog post.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's labor bureau chief, Terri Gerstein, wrote to 13 retailers in April 2015 as part of a review of on-call scheduling. In the letters, Gerstein reminded the companies that New York state law requires that an employee who reports for work must be paid four hours, or the number of hours of a regularly scheduled shift if that is less than four hours.
Gerstein told the retailers the attorney general's office had received reports that an increasing number of employers require their employees to call in “just a few hours in advance, or the night before.” Threatening enforcement action over this practice goes beyond what New York law says, said Jim Evans, a partner in Alston & Bird LLP's labor and employment practice who represents employers.
Whether the proposals become law, employers should focus on “the human aspect” of predictability in scheduling, he said. Employers that voluntarily change their practices and lawmakers who draft predictable scheduling laws should consider the “harsh economic consequences” of last-minute shift cancellations, he said.
New Application for Existing Laws
The New York attorney general's letters were sent to companies with household names such as Gap Inc., J. Crew and Burlington Coat Factory. One recipient was Abercrombie & Fitch Co., which is facing a class action in California over its use of on-call scheduling.
In the absence of laws requiring pay for on-call shifts, one team of lawyers is attempting to use wage and hour laws that are already on the books to help their clients. Hallie Von Rock and Carey James, of Aiman-Smith & Marcy, filed a lawsuit in December against Abercrombie & Fitch on behalf of C’endan Claiborne and a class they estimate includes between 15,000 and 65,000 members in three states.
In the lawsuit, Von Rock and James allege that the company's practice of requiring California employees to call in one hour before their scheduled start time in order to find out whether they're required to work the shift should be considered reporting to work. When an employee calls and is told to stay home, the employee is entitled to a few hours of pay, Von Rock and James told Bloomberg BNA.
Under wage and hour laws already on the books, Abercrombie should pay its employees for the time they spend calling in, Rock and James said. The calls last between two and 20 minutes, which adds up to several hours of unpaid wages per month, they said.
Von Rock and James contend that employees—who aren't paid for the time they spend on these phone calls—are reporting for work when they make these calls. “Even though they're not physically showing up” at the store, the phone call is the beginning of a work shift, Von Rock said. Abercrombie, which is represented by Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP and Vorys Sater Seymour and Pease LLP, denies the lawsuit’s allegations.
James said the law “is undeveloped in California” as to what qualifies as reporting for work under the reporting time law. “To me, report is a straightforward word and it could just as easily mean call,” he said.
Von Rock expressed concern about a power imbalance between employers and employees. Predictable scheduling laws attempt to level the unequal bargaining power, she said.
Simmons, with the National Retail Federation, views it differently. These laws insert friction into the employer-employee relationship, she told Bloomberg BNA. “These bills punish job creators,” the federation says in its restrictive scheduling toolkit. A better approach would be to continue to allow the market to strike a balance, Simmons said.
Common Ground
One thing on which supporters and opponents of predictable scheduling laws agree is that it's too soon to tell what kind of impact San Francisco's law is having. Ben-Ishai, the policy analyst, and Simmons, of the National Retail Federation, told Bloomberg BNA it is too early to have meaningful research.
Evans, the employer-side attorney, offered advice on balancing employers' need for flexibility with workers' need for predictability. “Focus on the human aspect of it,” he said. “I represent large corporations, many of which are very focused on the human aspect of it. I think that the human aspect of the legislation and the impact of the practices can't be overemphasized.”
“It's just not fair to subject people to that last minute change and kind of harsh economic consequences,” he added. “When you measure who has the ability to absorb the impact of a last minute change in schedule, the answer's kind of obvious.”
Source: Clasp
Celebs, supporters of Dream Act face off with anti-DACA protesters
For many DREAMERS, or undocumented young immigrants fighting to stay in the country, their battle could depend a lot on...
For many DREAMERS, or undocumented young immigrants fighting to stay in the country, their battle could depend a lot on what happens in the next few weeks in Congress.
Supporters and protestors of those DREAMERS clashed in West LA Wednesday in front of Senator Feinstein's office.
Read the full article here.
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