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.
Read the full article here.
New York City considers ban of on-call scheduling in retail
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.
With the heightened expectations of shoppers for convenience and service, retailers have to be able to provide a seamless omni-channel experience. Learn ways to truly optimize your fulfillment network in this new playbook.
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
Source
Charter Schools and the Waltons Take Little Rock Back to its Segregated Past
Charter Schools and the Waltons Take Little Rock Back to its Segregated Past
Stories about historic efforts to address racial segregation in American public education often start with Central High...
Stories about historic efforts to address racial segregation in American public education often start with Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. But the story of Little Rock and segregation badly needs updating.
Central High became one of the first practical tests of principles established in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruling that overturned racially separate public schools. When nine black students showed up for opening day of the historically all-white school, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called in the National Guard to prevent them from entering. President Dwight Eisenhower responded by calling in federal troops to escort the students into the school, and Faubus eventually backed down.
But the story of racial integration in Little Rock shouldn't be confined to Central High. The same year Central was integrated, another school, Hall High, opened in the all-white part of town with an all white student body. Hall would not integrate until 1959 (Faubus closed all Little Rock high schools in school year 1958-59 to protest federal intervention), when three black girls were allowed to attend.
By the late 1970s and early 80s, through busing and other efforts, Hall had become a more racially diverse school, according to Kathy Webb, who graduated from Hall in 1967.* Webb, who is white, currently represents Ward 3 on the Little Rock City Board and has served in the Arkansas state legislature.
In a phone conversation, Webb tells me that she remembers Hall High as a racially diverse school with an academically solid reputation and a relatively high graduation rate. But then, she notes, something happened: Hall High underwent a profound change.
By 2002, when Webb returned to live in Little Rock after decades away, Hall looked more like a school from the segregationist past than the model of progressive integratio it had once been. Today, the student population of Hall is just 5 percent white, with 70 percent of students having incomes low enough to receive free or reduced price lunch. Hall has also become a school with a reputation for low academic achievement, and in 2014, the state placed Hall on a list of six Little Rock schools in "academic distress."
And while Central High continues to be more racially balanced—54 percent black, 34 percent white—Little Rock School District as a whole is racially imbalanced, as CNN recently reported, with a school population that is 70 percent black in a city that is 55 percent white.
"People have been oblivious to this," Webb says about the re-segregation of the community and Hall High in particular.
What happened to Hall High is an example of what has been happening nationwide, according to a flurry of high profile media stories. Progress on racial integration in schools achieved during the Civil Rights period has gradually eroded, and in many cities, schools are now nearly as racially divided as they were 40 years ago.
"Integration as a constitutional mandate, as justice for black and Latino children, as a moral righting of past wrongs, is no longer our country’s stated goal," writes Nikole Hannah-Jones for the New York Times Magazine.
Hannah-Jones explains how, despite research studies showing the negative effects of racially segregated schools on children's education and long term success, Republican presidents since Eisenhower have appointed conservative Supreme Court judges who have whittled away at court-ordered integration plans until "legally and culturally, we’ve come to accept segregation once again."
But lengthy presentations of statistical data and litanies of high court decisions tend to overlook places where the fight to uphold the vision of a pluralistic school system is still very much alive—places like Little Rock, where the fight is still going on. The fight is inflamed with the same themes from when Ike invaded the district; the belief that "separate would never be equal" and that deep divisions in society have to be overcome by intentional policy decisions.
But now, the actors have changed. This time, those being accused of segregating students aren't local bigots. Instead, Little Rock citizens see segregation as being imposed upon them by outsiders, operating under the guise of a reform agenda.
In this conflict, the issue of local control—the cause Faubus and white Little Rock citizens held high in their fight against federal intervention—has been completely turned on its head, with the state government teaming up with wealthy allies to remove decision-making power from the community. And new entities, such as charter schools (publicly funded schools that are privately operated) and private foundations controlled by a small number of rich people, sow divisions in the community.
Once again, the fate of Little Rock's schools is a test of principles that may be adopted nationwide; only this time, in an effort to divide communities rather than unite them.
‘We Are Retreating to 1957’
"Most people [here] have been escaping rather than preparing for how to confront a world that is becoming more diverse," Arkansas State Senator Joyce Elliott tells me in a phone conversation. Elliott, who is black, is a Democratic member of the Arkansas Senate, representing the 31st District, which includes part of Little Rock.
The means of escape in Little Rock has changed over time, according to Elliott. Private schools enabling white flight from LRSD proliferated in the 1970s and '80s. In addition, district leaders, pressured by wealthy white citizens, redrew attendance zones to separate neighborhoods and avoid busing, a practice still in use today.
As John Kirk and Jess Porter explain in an overview of Little Rock's struggle with segregation appearing in the Arkansas Times, the city has been racially divided for decades by interstate highways, housing policies, and urban planning. Kirk and Porter, both history professors at University of Arkansas at Little Rock, note that segregation has been "consciously created by public policy, with private sector collusion."
"We are retreating to 1957," Elliott believes. Only now, instead of using Jim Crow and white flight, or housing and highways, the new segregationists have other tools at their disposal. First, education funding cuts have made competition for resources more intense, with wider disparities along racial lines. Second, recent state takeover of the district has spread a sense throughout the community of having lost control of its education destiny. Parents, local officials, and community activists continuously describe change as something being done to them rather than with them. And third, an aggressive charter school sector that competes with local public schools for resources and students further divides the community.
And lurking in the background of anything having to do with Little Rock school politics is the Walton Family Foundation, the philanthropic organization connected to the family that owns the Walmart retail chain, whose headquarters is in Bentonville, Arkansas.
A Struggle Over Resources
Arkansas is one of the many states that funds schools less than it did before the Great Recession. According to data compiled by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, between 2008 and 2014, school funding in Arkansas declined by more than 9 percent, while during those same years, student enrollment grew by 1.5 percent, according to the most recent measures and projections by the federal government.
Although the state's economy has recovered somewhat from the downturn, the state's politically conservative leadership continues to make cuts to public schools. The budget austerity is particularly harmful to schools that serve higher percentages of low-income children, as Little Rock's does.
According to a district-by-district map of poverty rates created by EdBuild, an education finance reform consultancy, the Little Rock School District, and its adjacent North Little Rock neighbor, are tasked with educating some of the poorest students in the state, with poverty rates of 26.9 percent and 33 percent, respectively, compared to school districts surrounding them, where poverty rates are much lower, around 17 percent.
State budget cuts prompted a $40 million decrease in school spending in Little Rock in early 2015. Then, later that year, a federal judge overturned the state's long-standing obligation to help fund Little Rock's expenses for desegregation. The payments had amounted to more than $1 billion in 60 years. That additional cut helped prompt another round of spending decreases in 2016.
"We are constantly having our resources taken away," Toney Orr tells me in a phone interview. "Families with means are moving on" to higher wealth schools that surround the district. "But if you’re a family without means, you can't move on," he says.
Orr, an African American father of twin sons in the Little Rock schools, tells me the general lack of resources in the district is leading to a more segregated system as "power struggles between the haves and the have-nots" have intensified.
An article in The Atlantic cites from a lawsuit brought by Little Rock parents that found huge differences between resources in schools with very high percentages of black students versus schools that enroll mostly white students. School conditions and access to computers vary considerably, with schools that are mostly white students having newer, cleaner buildings and plentiful computers while schools with almost all-black and brown students are more apt to be in decaying and decrepit buildings with few computers.
"We have created the conditions for undermining the schools," state senator Elliott says in describing the lack of resources in Little Rock schools, especially those serving low-income, non-white children.
For her part, Elliott has pushed for increases in education spending, particularly for a statewide early childhood education program for low-income kids and for dyslexia interventions in schools. Her Republican colleagues in state government tend to oppose these measures.
'A Very Racist Decision'
Not only does Little Rock have fewer resources for schools, local citizens now have less say in determining how those resources are managed.
In January 2015, the state board of education, an appointed board whose members are selected by the governor, voted to take over the district, dissolve the locally elected school board, and hand authority over to a governor-appointed Education Commissioner.
The takeover, according to an Arkansas independent news outlet, was justified largely on the basis of a previous decision to designate six schools, including Hall High School, as academically distressed. The same news article quotes a Little Rock minister calling the state takeover, "a very racist decision.”
Why racist? State takeovers have been occurring for years, for many reasons, but "racial issues" have long cast a "cloud" over these actions, according to a report by Education Week in 1998. That article quotes numerous sources who argue takeover efforts frequently have "singled out predominantly minority districts and violated the rights of voters to choose their local education policymakers."
The reporter cites survey results showing "out of 21 districts that have ceded power to mayors or state agencies in recent years … all but three have predominantly minority enrollments, and most are at least 80 percent nonwhite. Of eight districts that have been threatened with takeovers, all but two have populations that are predominantly minority, and three are at least 93 percent nonwhite."
More recently, the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS), a national alliance of 10 community organizations and rights groups, published a report titled, ”Out of Control: The Systemic Disenfranchisement of African American and Latino Communities Through School Takeovers." The report examined state takeovers of local schools in New Jersey, Louisiana, Michigan, Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania and found takeovers consistently produce increased racial segregation and loss of public institutions in communities of color.
Earlier this year, AROS director Keron Blair, in an article in Think Progress, compared takeovers "in predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods to the voter ID laws that prevent many people of color from casting a ballot, saying they are both examples of distrusting people of color to govern themselves."
Proponents of the takeover of LRSD deny race has anything to do with their actions, and claim that state takeover is simply about improving academics. But there are plenty of reasons to doubt this claim.
‘No Clear Evidence’: What Takeovers Don’t Do
"The rationale for the state takeover was never about academic distress," says Arkansas State Senator Linda Chesterfield, who represents District 30 that includes part of Little Rock. In a phone conversation, she tells me that the Little Rock district—Arkansas' largest—consists of 48 schools in all, some of which had been awarded for being the "most improved" schools in the state, including one of the schools deemed academically distressed.
Adding to Chesterfield's suspicion is the fact that just 15 percent of the schools in Little Rock were judged to be in academic distress, while other districts have higher percentages of struggling schools. In Forest City, for example, three of the district’s seven schools have been labeled academically distressed. In Blytheville, the district's only middle school and only high school are labeled academically distressed. And in Pine Bluff, the district's only high school and one of the two middle schools are labeled academically distressed. Proportionally, Little Rock doesn’t even come close.
Whatever intentions drove the decision, an additional problem is this: state takeovers of local schools have rarely produced academic improvements.
A recent report, “State Takeovers Of Low-Performing Schools,” examines the track record of district and school takeovers in states that have employed this governance method the longest: Louisiana, Michigan and Tennessee. The report concludes, “There is no clear evidence that takeover districts actually achieve their stated goals of radically improving performance at failing schools.”
The report, by the Center for Popular Democracy, finds that wherever the state takeovers occur, “Children have seen negligible improvement—or even dramatic setbacks—in their educational performance.”
A ‘Sharecropper’ School District
What state school district takeovers can do very well, though, is disenfranchise local voters.
As Senator Chesterfield, who was a school board member before running for statewide office, explains, "With [elected] school boards, you have a person you can go to if you have a complaint." But in a state takeover situation, "You can't go to the state commissioner."
"We've been turned into a sharecropper school district," says Orr.
Orr’s reference is to the agricultural system that emerged in America's post-Civil War Reconstruction period where white landowners, instead of giving up property to freed blacks, allowed former slaves to stay on the white man's land as long as the black farmers—and some poor white farmers—turned over a portion of their crops each year to the owner.
In Orr's sharecropper analogy, he likens state education commissioner Johnny Key to the landowner and the appointed superintendents that have churned through the system as the field bosses. In a sharecropper arrangement, "The landowner gave you what he thought you deserved," Orr explains. And in the case of Little Rock, what the district seems to "deserve" is less voice in how the district is run.
The disenfranchisement of Little Rock citizens became especially apparent recently, when Commissioner Key suddenly, and without explanation, terminated the contract of Baker Kurrus, until then the superintendent of the Little Rock School District. (Key had originally appointed Kurrus himself.)
As veteran local journalist for the Arkansas Times Max Brantley explains, Kurrus was initially regarded with suspicion due to the takeover and the fact he was given the helm despite his lack of education background. But Kurrus had gradually earned the respect of locals due to his tireless outreach to the community and evenhanded treatment of oppositional points of view.
But many observers of school politics in Little Rock speculate Kurrus was terminated because he warned that charter school expansions would further strain resources in the district. In advising against expansions of these schools, Kurrus shared data showing charter school tend to under-enroll students with disabilities and low income kids.
He came to view charter schools as a "parallel school system" that would add to the district's outlays for administration and facilities instead of putting more money directly into classroom instruction.
"It makes no sense" to expand charter schools, he is quoted as telling the local NPR outlet. “You’d never build two water systems and then see which one worked … That’s essentially what we’re doing” by expanding charters.
Kurrus also came to believe that increasing charter school enrollments would increase segregation in the city.
"Kurrus amassed significant data illustrating that charter schools have tended to take higher income and white students from the LRSD … further segregating education," Brantley reports. "Compared to the LRSD," Brantley adds, "eStem and LISA [the predominant charter networks in the city] contain lower percentages of children who live in poverty, African-American and Hispanic students, English-language learners and special education students – all of which give the charters a strong demographic edge.
Because of the state takeover and subsequent firing of Kurrus, the citizens of Arkansas are "basically powerless," says Kathy Webb, when it comes to governing their own schools.
"I don't see a master plan for fixing the district," says Antwan Phillips. Phillips is a Little Rock attorney and currently serves on an advisory board for the schools. (He was appointed by Kurrus.)
In a phone conversation, he tells me that if the district were a sick patient visiting a doctor, there would be some kind of diagnosis and prescription, yet none of that has been put forward by the state. And although there may not be a declared plan for Little Rock schools, the undeclared plan seems to call for rapid expansion of charter schools.
'A Parallel School System’
Charter schools existed in Little Rock before the state took over the district. But many people in the city believe the purpose of the takeover is to expand these charters further and add new ones.
The two most influential charter networks in the city, eStem and LISA, both started before the state takeover but were recently expanded by the state oversight board, despite an outpouring of opposition from the community. The expansions will double student enrollment in both charter networks. A third charter school has been given a three-year extension despite "struggling academically," according to a local reporter.
The takeover "is about money," Chesterfield claims. She points to the district's annual budget of $319 million – the largest in the state – and asks, "Why else would LRSD become the focal point of charters" when there are other districts with higher percentages of struggling schools and other districts with significant achievement gaps?
There's certainly not a lot of evidence that expanding charter schools will improve the overall academic performance of the district.
A report on the academic performance of charters throughout the state of Arkansas in 2008-2009 found, "Arkansas’ charter schools do not outperform their traditional school peers," when student demographics are taken into account. (As the report explains, "several demographic factors" – such as race, poverty, and ethnicity, – strongly correlate with lower scores on standardized tests and other measures of achievement.)
Specifically in Little Rock, the most recent comparison of charter school performance to public schools shows that a number of LRSD public schools, despite having similar or more challenging student demographics, out-perform LISA and eStem charters.
There's also evidence charter schools add to the segregation of Little Rock. Soon after the decision to expand these schools, the LISA network blanketed the district with a direct mail marketing campaign that blatantly omitted the poor, heavily black and Latino parts of the city, according to an investigation by the Arkansas Times.
The charter network's executives eventually apologized for the selective mailing. In their apology, they admitted working with state education officials—the very people who are tasked with overseeing charter operations—on a marketing plan that relegated low-income households to digital-only advertising, which makes no sense because these homes are the least apt to have computers and Internet connections.
With so much evidence that charter schools are both underperforming academically and increasing segregation in Little Rock, it’s worth asking: why is this expansion happening?
What Walton Wants
What's happening to Little Rock is "happening everywhere," according to Julie Johnson Holt, a Little Rock resident with children who went through the public schools in the district.
Holt, who is white, now runs a public relations consultancy but is the former communications director for the Arkansas Attorney General and the Department of Education.
More specifically, what's happening in Little Rock, according to Holt, is the outcome of a well-financed and strategically operated effort to target the community for large charter school expansions. "The charter movement has gotten very organized and very determined," she observes.
Holt attributes much of the strategy and wealth behind the effort to expand charter schools in Little Rock to the Walton Family Foundation, whose influence "is much bigger than I realized" she says, recalling her days working inside state government.
Indeed, the Waltons' influence features prominently in virtually every major decision concerning state governance of LRSD.
In the state board's vote to take over the district, as Brantley reports for the Times, members who voted yes had family ties to and business relationships with organizations either financed by the Walton Foundation or working in league with the Waltons to advocate for charter schools.
In another recent analysis in the Times, reporter Benjamin Hardy traces recent events back to a bill in the state legislature in 2015, HB 1733, that "originated with a Walton-affiliated education lobbyist." That bill would have allowed an outside non-profit to operate any school district taken over by the state. The bill died in committee when unified opposition from the Little Rock delegation combined with public outcry to cause legislators to waver in their support.
So what the Waltons couldn't accomplish with legislation like HB 1733 they are currently accomplishing by influencing official administration actions, including taking out Kurrus and expanding charters across the city.
In one case, as Brantley reports again, a Little Rock charter is being expanded via the waiving of certain state requirements – thereby allowing the expansion to be "fast-tracked."
Brantley notes the expansion is being enabled through relocation to a new, larger site in close proximity to an existing public school that is considered "struggling" but is actually higher-rated than the charter school by the state's school evaluation system. The new site is owned by a leasing agent with an address "that happens to be the mailing address for Walton Enterprises, the holding company for the vast wealth of Walton heirs."
Most recently, WFF announced it would commit $250 million to help charter schools in 17 urban district finance access to facilities. One of the urban districts Walton intends to target is Little Rock.
So what are Waltons' intentions for Little Rock? Do they really want to re-segregate schools and take the community back to 1957?
In a recent investigative article I wrote on the influence of the Walton Foundation on education policy, I asked Jeffrey R. Henig what motivates the Waltons' efforts. Henig is a political science and education professor at Teachers College, Columbia University and a co-editor of the book The New Education Philanthropy.
Henig believes the goal the Waltons have in mind is for school districts across the country to be more decentralized and for the expansion of charters to allow for more "more variety" of schools, especially for schools that reflect "differing value systems or ideas of what is a good school."
One of the "value systems" Henig believes the Waltons would like to see more accommodated in public education is more schools that are "rooted in conservative tradition."
It's not hard to believe that an accommodation of more conservative tradition in public education, especially in the South, is the same thing as what Senator Elliott calls "the Old Southern economic structure."
She adds, "We know how that movie ends."
It Doesn't Have To Be This Way
Of course, the movie doesn’t have to end that way.
Arkansas state lawmakers can choose to bring education funding back to levels at least as generous as what was spent in 2008. The funding can be made more equitable by having in place distribution formulas that ensure money goes to schools that need it most.
Also, state leadership can choose to return control of LRSD to a locally elected school board and give people in Little Rock the power to determine the role of charter schools in the district.
And the citizens of Little Rock will need to choose whether to be further divided or unify in support of their historic public schools.
"I'd like to see people in Little Rock deliberately want to have children go to school together," says Elliott.
There are signs Little Rock may be doing that. As Times reporter Hardy notes in his analysis cited above, there is a unified energy throughout all racial populations in the community to take back control of their schools.
"There's been an awakening," city director Kath Webb agrees, noting the number of Hall High School alums who now volunteer in the school to mentor and tutor students and support school events.
When people living around Hall High, where Webb lives, considered renaming the Hall High Neighborhood Association to something that didn’t include the school name, homeowners decided otherwise and retained Hall High.
And the school itself, despite being stigmatized with the label of "failure" and being redesigned around racial imbalance, has chosen to keep in its mission statement a commitment to being a place for "positive learning" and "diverse cultures."
Political leaders in Arkansas should support that mission too.
*Correction: The original version of this article stated that Hall High diversified in the late 1960s. It has been corrected to indicate that that transformation happened in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
By JEFF BRYANT
Source
Battleground Texas: Progressive Cities Fight Back Against Anti-Immigrant, Right-Wing Forces
Battleground Texas: Progressive Cities Fight Back Against Anti-Immigrant, Right-Wing Forces
Sarah Johnson, the executive director of Local Progress, a group that works with Casar and other local politicians on...
Sarah Johnson, the executive director of Local Progress, a group that works with Casar and other local politicians on passing progressive legislation, told Salon that the initiative "brings together the way that policing impacts both immigrant communities and more broadly communities of color that are overcriminalized."
Read the full article here.
Activists Descend on Fed’s Jackson Hole Meeting, Amid Anxiety About Rate Rises
Liberal and conservative groups of central-bank critics plan to hold events to coincide with the Fed symposium, which...
Liberal and conservative groups of central-bank critics plan to hold events to coincide with the Fed symposium, which runs Thursday through Saturday.
The left-leaning group, called Fed Up, will be gathering in the same Jackson Lake Lodge as the Fed attendees, arguing the central bank shouldn’t raise short-term interest rates anytime soon. The right-leaning group, the American Principles Project, is holding a separate gathering nearby to discuss the effect of Fed policies on the dollar and to urge the current crop of presidential candidates to pay more attention to Fed policy issues.
Fed officials also are getting plenty of advice from other experts on the sidelines. Harvard University’s Lawrence Summers, a former Treasury secretary and one-time candidate for Fed chairman, warned in an opinion article this week that raising rates soon would be a “dangerous mistake.” Martin Feldstein, another Harvard professor, used an opinion article to blame the stock market’s current woes on past Fed policy mistakes and urge the Fed not to delay rate increases beyond September.
The Kansas City Fed conference takes place amid considerable turmoil in global financial markets. Stocks, bonds and currencies have gyrated in recent days as investors try to make sense of China’s economic slowdown and what that could mean for the U.S., the global economy and markets. The anxiety has occluded the outlook for Fed policy: Whereas market participants were recently looking to a possible mid-September Fed rate increase, it now appears the odds have diminished.
The liberal Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up coalition says it is planning to bring 50 or more activists to the Jackson Lake Lodge for meetings on Fed policy, economic inequality and racial disparities. The group also went to Jackson Hole last year.
Fed Up plans to hold a news conference Thursday and panel discussions with names such as, “Do Black Lives Matter to the Fed?” and “Who’s Afraid of High Wages? A History of the Inflation Bogeyman.” The group says its events are open to all and it hopes attendees at the Kansas City Fed event stop by.
Fed Up has seen successes in gaining one-on-one meetings with regional Fed bank leaders—they recently sat down with the chiefs of the Atlanta and New York Fed banks. It will bring folks to Jackson Hole who are affected by central-bank policies, but whose voices are rarely heard in the debate.
Atlanta resident Dawn O’Neill, a 48-year-old married grandmother, plans to go to Jackson Hole with the Fed Up group. Her unemployed husband struggles to find day work in the construction industry, and she works as teacher’s assistant in a day-care facility for $8.50 an hour.
“When the Fed says the economy is in recovery, and they want to raise the interest rates, I look around and I don’t see recovery,” Ms. O’Neal said. “I see lines of black men that want work, but there is no work.”
The group says that if the Fed keeps its benchmark short-term rate near zero for longer, it will generate more economic growth that creates more jobs among low-wage earners as well as higher-paid workers. The group also believes that better job growth will help benefit minorities and make discrimination harder.
“We have leaders of the Fed who don’t think slow wages and underemployment are problems,” said Ady Barkan, who leads Fed Up’s activities. “When you have leadership like that, you get policies that don’t advance the needs of working families,” he told reporters in a conference call on Monday.
Fed chiefs for years have acknowledged the painfully slow recovery of the labor market and rising income inequality. Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen gave a speech on inequality last October that garnered her criticism from congressional Republicans who believe such matters are beyond the Fed’s official mission.
Fed officials say their easy-money policies aimed at stimulating the economy are intended to benefit all Americans, not just the wealthy. Last year, former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke pointed to the recovery of the housing and labor markets as evidence the Fed’s efforts were helping the middle and lower classes.
Even now, Fed officials generally say raising their benchmark short-term rate target by a quarter-percentage point from near zero won’t offer much restraint to growth. The see a small move as reducing the amount of economic stimulus they are providing, akin to lightening the pressure on the accelerator rather than tapping the brake.
They believe that while inflation remains too low, the unemployment rate has fallen enough to start the process of getting short-term interest rates back to more historically normal levels. Some worry that if the Fed sticks with ultralow rates much longer, it could create financial-market bubbles that could wound the broader economy.
The Fed also will be challenged by the American Principles Project, which is holding its event near the central-bank conference and will count participants from the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, both Washington think tanks. In a news release, Steven Lonegan, the group’s monetary-policy director, said, “We will challenge prevailing wisdom and show how the Federal Reserve’s policies have negatively impacted wage growth and contributed to the rising cost of living.”
Wage growth has been tepid in recent years, despite Fed officials’ hopes their easy-money policies would spur stronger gains. Inflation has fallen well short of the Fed’s 2% target for years.
The Kansas City Fed declined to comment on the activity of outside groups around its conference.
Source: iBloomberg
Hearing on charter schools brings out varied opinions
State Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale got an earful during a daylong meeting in Philadelphia on Friday...
State Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale got an earful during a daylong meeting in Philadelphia on Friday on ways to improve the accountability and effectiveness of charter schools.
Paul Kihn, deputy superintendent of the Philadelphia School District, warned that if Harrisburg passed pending legislation that would permit the unlimited growth of charters, the cost to the district would be so devastating that it might not be able to manage its own schools.
Lawrence Jones Jr., head of Richard Allen Preparatory Charter School in Southwest Philadelphia, said the state needs to provide equitable funding for both district and charter schools.
"This grand experiment is one that is about to collapse under its own weight, because we are doing such a poor job in oversight," said Donna Cooper, executive director of Public Citizens for Children and Youth.
Kyle Serrette, education director for the Washington-based Center for Popular Democracy, said his organization was stunned by the number of federal fraud cases involving charter officials that have occurred in Pennsylvania in recent years.
His group, which works with community groups and unions, called for "a comprehensive investigation that allows the public, regulators, and legislators to better understand the depth of the problem" to improve oversight.
And Philadelphia City Controller Alan Butkovitz told the auditor general that his office is taking another look at the district's charter school office and a group of city charter schools.
The review, which he expects to be completed in a few months, is a follow-up to a study his office completed in 2010 which found that the charter office "was not doing its job" overseeing the schools and that questionable practices were rampant at 13 charters it reviewed.
It was the fifth and final meeting that DePasquale has held across the state to gather input on improving the state's 174 taxpayer-funded charters, which enroll 120,000 students.
Philadelphia is home to 86 charters with 67,000 students.
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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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Castro moves to stop VP fire from the left
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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How Hillary Clinton can win in November
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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The next labor fight is over when you work, not how much you make
Washington Post - 05-08-2015 - If there’s one labor issue that’s come to the forefront of political agendas over the...
Washington Post - 05-08-2015 - If there’s one labor issue that’s come to the forefront of political agendas over the past few years, it’s the minimum wage: Cities and states around the country are taking action to boost worker pay, as federal efforts seem doomed to fail.
But a new wave of reform is already in the works. Instead of how much you earn, it addresses when you work -- pushing back against the longstanding corporate trend toward timing shifts exactly when labor is needed, sometimes in tiny increments, or at the very last minute. That practice, nicknamed “just-in-time” scheduling, can wreak havoc on the lives of workers who can’t plan around work obligations that might pop up at any time.
Right now, community groups and unions in Washington D.C. are formulating a bill that will address the problem of schedules that can be both shifting and inflexible. The legislation hasn’t been hammered out yet, but the labor-backed group Jobs with Justice says it will likely include a requirement that employers provide workers with notice of their schedules a few weeks ahead of time, and that additional hours go to existing employees, rather than spreading them across a large workforce.
“The one thing we’re finding overwhelmingly is that people aren’t getting enough hours to make ends meet,” says Ari Schwartz, a campaign organizer at D.C. Jobs with Justice, which is now tabulating the results of a survey of hundreds of hourly workers in the city on scheduling issues. “People aren’t getting their schedules with enough time to plan childcare and the rest of the things in their lives.”
When a proposal reaches the D.C. Council in the coming months, Washington won’t be the first: Following the passage of landmark legislation in San Francisco, bills have been offered in Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Illinois, Connecticut, California, New York, Michigan and Oregon. Along with new proposals to expand paid sick day legislation, they are a bid to give employees more control over how they spend their time.
“These scheduling reforms are getting really popular, because it makes no sense that for example you’re required to be available to work by your employer and you’re not picked for that time,” says Tsedeye Gebreselassie, a senior staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project. “People who don’t suffer these abuses already understand what it’s like to juggle work and family, so people really identify with that as being a problem.”
Carrots and sticks
Twenty years ago, schedules weren’t as much of a problem. Working in retail, especially, tended to be a solid 9 to 5 job.
But then retail hours grew longer. And then came computerized scheduling, which allowed employers to best fit staffing to demand. Here’s what that looks like in practice: Handing out schedules based on what times of day or the month you expect the most business, splitting up hours across a large workforce that’s available on a moment’s notice and sometimes sending people home if traffic is slow.
That helps companies optimize their labor costs, but it wreaks havoc on the lives of low-wage workers, who don’t know how much they’re going to make from week to week, and often can’t schedule anything else around work.
One worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she is still employed there, has worked in the hot food prep section of the Whole Foods at 14th and P streets in Washington for 12 years. She liked it; the pay wasn’t bad, and the people were friendly. She worked consistently from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., and took a second job as a nanny in the afternoons, which added around $300 a week to her income — more money to send home to her father in El Salvador, and to support her daughter in college in Tennessee.
But then, a new manager cut back hours; some people left and weren’t replaced. The schedule posted on the wall started to shift the worker’s days off, or tell her to come in from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. instead. Usually she got a week’s notice, but once in a while she’d come to work and the schedule had already changed, so she’d have to go back home. After that happened on too many days, she had to drop the afternoon job. So once again, she was just squeaking by.
“She would come and say ‘I really need you to cover this shift,’ and it is what it is,” the worker says in Spanish, through a translator. “Lots of us have lost lots of jobs.”
It’s been better over the past few months, she says. And that’s not by accident: As public complaints surfaced about Whole Foods’ scheduling practices, the company rolled out a new system that allows employees to see their schedules for two weeks in advance and prevents managers from changing them at the last minute or scheduling “clopenings”-- both closing the store and opening it in the morning -- without an employee’s consent. The policy has been in place nationwide since early April, spokesman Michael Silverman says.
Whole Foods isn’t alone. Walmart has also introduced a system of “open shifts,” which allows workers to pick their own hours. Starbucks curbed some of its practices in the wake of a New York Times article last year that described their effect on one barista. The Gap is working with the Center for WorkLife Law at Hastings College of Law in San Francisco to set up pilot projects around the country that would measure the impact of giving employees stable schedules and more hours. Many companies haven’t taken into account how much their scheduling practices are actually costing them in the form of employee turnover, professor Joan Williams says.
“If you don’t count that cost, it disappears. The idea is to generate the kind of rigorous data that will be needed to persuade people to change their financial models."
— Professor Joan Williams, Hastings College of Law
“If you don’t count that cost, it disappears. The idea is to generate the kind of rigorous data that will be needed to persuade people to change their financial models," says Williams. "Our hypothesis is that if you provide people with more stable schedules, you’ll see lower turnover [and] absenteeism and higher worker engagement.”
In time, the business case may grow clear enough that more companies move toward stable schedules on their own. But Williams says legislative efforts are needed as well: A recent national survey found that 41 percent of early-career, hourly workers get their schedules less than a week in advance. In a survey of retail and restaurant workers in Washington, Jobs with Justice found that employers like Forever21 and Chipotle are among the worst offenders. (Forever21 did not respond to a request for comment. Chipotle says it publishes schedules four days in advance, with shifts lasting seven hours on average.)
And now, there’s legislation to benchmark against. Last year, San Francisco became the first jurisdiction to pass comprehensive scheduling reform, with a set of companion bills that require “formula retailers” (i.e., large chains) to give workers two weeks notice of their schedules, pay workers for the shifts when they’re on call and give hours to current employees instead of hiring more, among other provisions. The law went into effect in January, but won’t be enforced until July.
Meanwhile, scheduling legislation is in the works around the country. National groups like the Center for Popular Democracy and the National Womens Law Center are helping to build coalitions where scheduling reforms could prove politically palatable, in places like New York — where the union-backed Retail Action Project has been advocating for “just hours” for years — and Minnesota, where the AFL-CIO-affiliated Working America has been building support among non-union members for measures that would benefit all workers.
Scheduling legislation even exists on the federal level. A federal bill introduced in Congress last summer would require employers to make schedule accommodations for health or childcare needs, unless there is a “bona fide business reason” for denying it. Yet another bill, proposed last month, would prevent employers from firing workers for requesting a schedule change.
But it hasn’t been smooth sailing for the scheduling reform movement. A Maryland bill failed this year, in the face of employer opposition. And though there isn’t even a bill yet in Washington, businesses are voicing skepticism.
“Any time you alter how employers hire, schedule or retain their workforce, if that flexibility makes DC less attractive to businesses, than I’m concerned about that."
— Harry Wingo, president of the D.C. Chamber of Commerce
“Any time you alter how employers hire, schedule or retain their workforce, if that flexibility makes DC less attractive to businesses, than I’m concerned about that,” said Harry Wingo, president of the D.C. Chamber of Commerce. “The D.C. chamber is concerned about any restrictions on free enterprise.”
It’s perhaps more concerning to employers than even raising the minimum wage: That’s just extra cost. Scheduling, by contrast, impacts the very core of how they’ve learned to do business.
Making it real
Laws, of course, are only as good as their enforcers. And scheduling laws, with their far-reaching impact, could be particularly difficult to follow up on.
Just ask unions, which already have many of the proposed scheduling rules in their contracts. Making sure employers stick to them is a big job, even though union dues pay for far more inspectors — in the form of business agents and shop stewards — than city and state governments ever will.
“The union has this exact set of provisions in its contracts, and they are extremely important for making sure that if you have the seniority you can get the fullest work week possible,” says John Boardman, president of UNITE-HERE Local 25, which represents 6,500 mostly hotel workers in the D.C. area. “But it also takes a very, very strong enforcement mechanism in order to make these provisions of the contract viable and living.”
Jobs with Justice already knows this. A few years ago, D.C. passed laws requiring employers to pay for a minimum of 4 hours in a shift, even if a worker was sent home early, and to pay an extra hour’s worth of wages for every “split shift” (with a long break in the middle) that an employee works. In its survey, Jobs with Justice found that workers were sent home early and asked to work split shifts just as much as they were in 2010, when another survey was done, suggesting the laws hadn’t had much effect.
That’s why they’re hoping the city will put more resources into enforcement, in the form of inspectors and people to process claims. But it’s also going to have to involve a massive education campaign to make workers aware they even have these new rights.
"It is easier to enforce these things when you have a union contract and a grievance procedure, and a shop steward and union infrastructure to back that up,” says Schwartz. “But we can’t keep relying on that as our only model. Because there’s so many workers in the growing retail and restaurant sectors that need those protections, too.”
Source: The Washington Post
13 hours ago
13 hours ago