Zara Latest ‘Cool’ Retailer in Hot Water for Alleged Discrimination
Spanish fashion chain Zara is among several “hip” retailers making headlines recently for alleged discrimination...
Spanish fashion chain Zara is among several “hip” retailers making headlines recently for alleged discrimination against employees.
Ian Miller, a former attorney for the mega-retailer, claims he was harassed and discriminated against for being Jewish and gay. In his $40 million lawsuit against the company, which is owned by Inditex SA, Miller alleges that he was excluded from meetings, given smaller raises than other employees and subjected to discriminatory remarks.
In addition, the Center for Popular Democracy released a survey of New York–based Zara employees, titled “Stitched with Prejudice: Zara USA’s Corporate Culture of Favoritism.” The report found that black employees are more dissatisfied with their hours than white employees, are reviewed more harshly by management and are least likely to be promoted.
When it comes to people who shop at Zara, black customers are seven times more likely to be targeted as potential thieves than white customers, the report found.
A spokesperson for Inditex refuted the claims in the Center for Popular Democracy report in a statement to FOXBusiness.com.
“It fails to follow an acceptable methodology for the conduct of a credible objective survey on workplace practices, and instead appears to have taken an approach to achieve a pre-determined result which was to discredit Zara. Zara USA believes that the claims made in the report are completely inconsistent with the company’s true culture and the experiences of the over 1,100 Zara employees in New York City and over 3,500 in all the US,” said the spokesperson.
Perhaps even more high profile is a discrimination case involving Abercrombie & Fitch (ANF), which made its way to the Supreme Court. The preppy retailer known for its presence in American malls was sued by Samantha Elauf, a young Muslim woman who wore a headscarf to a job interview at the company seven years ago.
“Ms. Elauf never informed Abercrombie before its hiring decision that she wore her head scarf, or ‘hijab,’ for religious reasons,” the ruling stated.
The Supreme Court recently overturned that decision.
A spokesperson for Abercrombie & Fitch told FOXBusiness.com in a statement that although the Tenth Circuit decision was overturned by the Supreme Court, it was not determined that the company discriminated against Elauf.
“We will determine our next steps in the litigation, which the Supreme Court remanded for further consideration. A&F remains focused on ensuring the company has an open-minded and tolerant workplace environment for all current and future store associates. We have made significant enhancements to our store associate policies, including the replacement of the 'look policy' with a new dress code that allows associates to be more individualistic; changed our hiring practices to not consider attractiveness; and changed store associates' titles from 'Model' to 'Brand Representative' to align with their new customer focus. This case relates to events occurring in 2008. A&F has a longstanding commitment to diversity and inclusion, and consistent with the law, has granted numerous religious accommodations when requested, including hijabs,” the spokesperson said.
Nasty Gal, a self-described “global online destination for fashion-forward, free-thinking girls,” is being sued for illegally firing Aimee Concepcion and several other employees either before taking or during maternity/paternity leave.
The lawyer for the former employee that filed the suit, who will represent three other female ex-employees in arbitration hearings, said “they were the only pregnant females who provided notice of maternity leave before being terminated, and …their jobs were taken over by other employees.”
"The accusations made in the lawsuits are false, defamatory and taken completely out of context,” a Nasty Gal spokesperson told FOXBusiness.com. “The layoffs in question were part of a larger restructuring of departments we completed over nine months ago. The lawsuits are frivolous and without merit."
When it comes to the likelihood of this case succeeding in court, it is worth looking to similar prior verdicts for perspective.
“Shortly before they filed the Nasty Gal lawsuit, a $7.7 million verdict in favor of a pregnant (at the pertinent time) Price is Right model was affirmed by a California appellate court,” said Jeff Trexler, associate director at Fordham’s Fashion Law Institute.
On the flip side, “If Nasty Gal can show that it actually provided the requisite notices, offered reasonable accommodation to her (Concepcion’s) pregnancy, wasn't motivated to fire her because of her pregnancy, and did not treat pregnant women differently from other employees in similar positions, there's a substantial possibility that the company will prevail,” said Trexler.
Retail stores have also received flack in recent months for selling discriminatory merchandise. Urban Outfitters (URBN) was condemned by organizations including the Human Rights Campaign and the Anti-Defamation League for a gray- and white-striped tapestry imprinted with a pink triangle that was sold at a store in Boulder, Colorado. The groups said the item projected Holocaust imagery, specifically of the uniforms gay men were forced to wear in Nazi concentration camps. Calls for comment to Urban Outfitters were not returned by the time of publication.
Despite the extent of public outcry over the merchandise, Urban Outfitters is technically allowed to sell whatever it wants.
“Designs evocative of Nazi imagery may be offensive, but they're no more illegal than the Confederate flag; ultimately, the decision to stop selling designs with either image comes down to ethical and reputation management concerns,” said Trexler.
In recent weeks, several retailers including Wal-Mart (WMT), Sears (SHLD) and Amazon (AMZN) announced they would stop selling Confederate battle flag merchandise following the mass shooting in June at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
No stranger to controversy, Zara was also accused of selling discriminatory merchandise. A 2014 white-and-blue striped shirt, which featured a six-pointed star, came under fire for its resemblance to uniforms worn by Jewish prisoners at Nazi concentration camp. The “sheriff shirt” was pulled from the retailer’s site after it issued an apology.
So, is outcry over discrimination becoming more common in the retail industry, or is it simply that intense media scrutiny is making it seem like it is?
“Allegations of discrimination are nothing new in fashion, as with any business, but what's particularly noteworthy now is their potential to have a substantial negative impact on a brand,” said Trexler. “One could say that the way people characterize discrimination is shifting from incident to identity, and in this fashion reflects a broader cultural trend that has emerged alongside advances in communications technology.”
When asked if changes in the law are making discrimination lawsuits easier to file, Trexler said that enforcement has shifted “in ways that arguably encourage people to take legal action.”
Most notably, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has worked to make pregnancy discrimination an enforcement priority, and a Supreme Court decision also raised awareness on the issue.
“Acts that might have gone unchallenged in years past now might be more likely to spark a lawsuit,” said Trexler.
Source: Fox Business
What Will a Trump Administration Mean for Supporters of Public Education?
What Will a Trump Administration Mean for Supporters of Public Education?
We don’t know very much about President-Elect Donald Trump’s ideas about education. Although, during the campaign,...
We don’t know very much about President-Elect Donald Trump’s ideas about education. Although, during the campaign, Trump briefly presented a plan for a $20 billion block grant program for states to expand market-based school choice, and although he has hinted that he will reduce the role of the U.S. Department of Education and particularly its civil rights enforcement division, there has been no substantive explanation or discussion of these ideas.
One thing we do know for sure, however, is that every branch of our federal government will be dominated by Republicans—the Presidency, the Senate, the House, and the Supreme Court.
A new President whose plans we do not know. The absence of checks and balances. Federal public education policy that has for years been undermining support for the institution of public education. Those of us who believe improving the public schools is important have good reason to be nervous, even afraid.
After all, in 2000 and especially after we were distracted in September of 2001 by the attacks on the World Trade Center, we were unprepared to speak to the federal test-and-punish education law, No Child Left Behind. We failed to connect the dots between an accountability-driven, poorly funded testing mandate and the destruction of respect for school teachers and the drive for school privatization that lurked just under the surface of federal policy. And in 2008, we didn’t anticipate the collusion of government technocrats and philanthro-capitalists that emerged when the federal stimulus gave billions of dollars to the U.S. Department of Education for competitive experiments with top-down turnarounds to close and privatize schools and attack teachers.
Advocates for improving public schools—particularly the schools in the struggling neighborhoods of our cities where poverty is concentrated—were unprepared. We struggled to define what it all meant. Why had accountability replaced nurturing children as the mission of the schools? How are achievement gaps affected by opportunity gaps? What did it mean that everyone had come to define school quality by test scores without any attention to the capacity of communities to provide the necessary conditions for teaching and learning? How had it happened that everybody was suddenly focused on so-called “failing” schools? Why did everyone suddenly feel that it was appropriate to blame and castigate school teachers who were said to be protecting adult interests instead of putting students first? And how had it happened that so many people prized the innovation that was supposed to come with charter schools unbound from bureaucratic regulations, and yet those in charge no longer worried about strengthening the oversight necessary for protecting children’s rights and the expenditure of tax dollars? How had so many people come to accept that the market would take care of all this?
We watched with dismay as all this came to pass, but we were unprepared to name it, unprepared to think through how it all worked, unprepared to do something about it.
But there is an important development these days among advocates for public schools—the people who agree that we need to promote equity and justice in education’s public sector. Advocates today share broad consensus around the following priorities:
• driving long-denied public investment to improve the public schools in our poorest communities where family poverty is concentrated, and correcting inadequate and inequitably distributed school funding;
• addressing family poverty that, research has demonstrated again and again, is likely to undermine children’s achievement at school;
• ensuring that public dollars are not diverted and that charter schools do not operate as parasites destroying their host school districts;
• supporting school teachers as a strong, stable cadre of professionals;
• reducing reliance on standardized testing and eliminating high stakes punishments including turnarounds;
• rejecting privatization of education and ensuring strong oversight by government of the institutions that serve our children and spend our tax dollars;
• eliminating widespread overuse—especially in the schools serving our society’s poorest children—of the practices of suspending and expelling students and the widespread obedience-driven discipline practices imposed on poor children when more privileged children attend schools where they are encouraged to question and engage.
At the national level, organizations supporting justice and equity in public education are now unified across a range of constituencies and sectors to endorse and work for these values and priorities. Here are just some of the centers of advocacy these days:
• The Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools is a broad coalition of unions—the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and the Service Employees International Union; civil rights and community organizing groups–Advancement Project, Alliance for Educational Justice, Center for Popular Democracy, Journey for Justice Alliance; and academic, philanthropic and justice advocacy groups—the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, the Gamaliel Network, and the Schott Foundation for Public Education.
• The NAACP and Black Lives Matter have recently come together in the civil rights community to challenge privatization and lack of oversight as charter schools have expanded.
• The Network for Public Education is an alliance of advocates including school teachers, activists, and bloggers in support of strong and inclusive public schools and in opposition to unregulated charter schools and to over-reliance on high stakes testing.
• The National Education Policy Center, located at the University of Colorado, publishes academic research and reviews research from other agencies on education policy.
• The Education Law Center, and its Education Justice program, and Public Advocates and other school law attorneys are working for school funding equity and civil rights protection.
Last week the education writer, Jonathan Kozol, reminded us about what most of us now know how to articulate but what, ten or fifteen years ago, we would have struggled to say: “Slice it any way you want. Argue, as we must, that every family ought to have the right to make whatever choice they like in the interests of their child, no matter what damage it may do to other people’s children. As an individual decision, it’s absolutely human; but setting up this kind of competition, in which parents with the greatest social capital are encouraged to abandon their most vulnerable neighbors, is rotten social policy. What this represents is a state supported shriveling of civic virtue, a narrowing of moral obligation to the smallest possible parameters. It isn’t good… for democracy.”
Today we are well-aware of the organizations that have persistently undermined support for public education and at the same time pressed for an unregulated school marketplace as the alternative: the Hoover Institution; the Heritage Foundation; the American Enterprise Institute; the Thomas Fordham Foundation; Michigan’s Dick and Betsy DeVos and their many far-right organizations; New York hedge fund managers spreading their billions across New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts via the dark money Families for Excellent Schools; the New Schools Venture Fund; the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington that promotes portfolio school reform; the Gates, Walton, and Broad venture philanthropies spending billions promoting charter schools; the U.S. Department of Education under Arne Duncan that granted billions of dollars—without much oversight at all according to the Department’s own Office of Inspector General— to states to expand charter schools; and the American Legislative Exchange Council that promotes school privatization across the states via its large membership of state legislators.
The same election that brought us President-Elect Donald Trump also brought evidence that today’s public school advocates have become organized and effective. Question 2 to expand the growth of charter schools went down to resounding defeat in a Massachusetts referendum, and Georgia Governor Nathan Deal’s plan for state takeover and charterization of Georgia’s struggling public schools was also soundly defeated at the polls. Voters responded to protect the idea of public education when the stakes for public schools were clearly defined by well organized and well informed advocates.
During a Donald Trump administration we must stay organized, raising our voices persistently to name and frame our concerns with precision and passion. A public education system is the best institution to meet the needs of all kinds of children and protect their rights through law. Our public schools are, of course, imperfect. It is our responsibility to pay attention and ensure that our schools work for all children. Democracy makes our role as citizens possible and requires engaged citizenship.
Looking back on his life as an education professor and advocate for education, Bill Ayers suggests something that will be particularly important for us to remember under the presidency of Donald Trump: that public education is the institutional embodiment of the values that define our democracy. “Education for free people is powered by a particularly precious and fragile ideal. Every human being is of infinite and incalculable value, each a work in progress and a force in motion, each a unique intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, moral, and creative force, each of us born equal in dignity and rights, each endowed with reason and conscience and agency, each deserving a dedicated place in the community of solidarity as well as a vital sense of brotherhood and sisterhood, recognition and respect. Embracing that basic ethic and spirit, people recognize that the fullest development of each individual—given the tremendous range of ability and the delicious stew of race, ethnicity, points of origin, and background—is the necessary condition for the full development of the entire community, and, conversely, that the fullest development of all is essential for the full development of each. This has obvious implications for education policy.” (Demand the Impossible, p. 161)
By janresseger
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This Week In Sports Law: Ezekiel Elliott News, Phil Ivey U.K. Loss, Pop Warner Case Goes On
Dallas Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliott will suit up and play against the Washington Redskins, as the ongoing drama...
Dallas Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliott will suit up and play against the Washington Redskins, as the ongoing drama in the courtroom over the NFL's tabled six game suspension continues. On Monday, the U.S. district court judge in New York denied the NFL's attempt to hurry up the scheduling on a hearing that will provide more clarity as to whether Elliott will actually be held out of any games this season while the case goes on.
Read the 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
Fatal Construction Accident Shows Higher Risks Faced by Latino Workers
Truthout - March 31. 2015, by Danica Jorden - Monday morning, March 23, 2015, in Raleigh, North Carolina, was a mild...
Truthout - March 31. 2015, by Danica Jorden - Monday morning, March 23, 2015, in Raleigh, North Carolina, was a mild and slightly overcast day. The first signs of spring were beginning to emerge after an uncharacteristically chilly winter for the capital of the Southern state. But the recent cold weather had hardly hampered the construction of several high-rise office and condo projects, unprecedented for the generally low-rise city.
The 12-story Charter Square was one such project, and on March 23, just before 11 am, workers were busy on its south wall, with two mast climbers attached to its all-glass surface. Mast climbers are a scaffolding device employing a thin, central steel column stuck to the side of a structure, along which a horizontal platform that ferries workers up and down, so that they can install the glass panels future occupants will gaze from when the building is finished. On this day, the mast climbers were to be dismantled, with the building scheduled for opening in May.
About halfway up, the mast suddenly peeled off the side of the building, sending José Erasmo Hernández, José Luis López Ramírez and Anderson Antones de Almeida to their deaths, and Elmer Guevara to the hospital in serious condition. The four men were working for a tangled web of contractors and subcontractors, and the Department of Labor's representative on the scene said that contractors themselves inspect mast climbers, which are not specifically regulated by the state.
North Carolina Occupational Safety and Health's Kevin Beauregard indicated that OSHA, the federal agency, also does not have specific guidelines regarding mast climbers. He added that he did not expect to find that the scaffolding had been previously inspected. "There's no possible way our inspectors can go to every site,"Beauregard said. "We have over 200,000 work sites in North Carolina. We have approximately 75 to 100 inspectors employed. So it's physically not possible to go to every single site."
(Photo: Danica Jorden)
2014 was the North Carolina construction industry's most deadly year, according todata from the state Department of Labor. Nineteen people lost their lives working in construction in 2014, or 43 percent of the 44 work-related deaths statewide. Falls accounted for 13 of those deaths. The death rate was nearly double that of 2013.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Latinos are overrepresented in the construction industry, holding 24 percent of all construction jobs. But visits to construction sites in North Carolina reveal that Latinos are far more present at the front lines: scaling walls, down in holes and operating dangerous equipment. A closer look at the statistics shows that Latinos make up only 14 percent of first-line supervisors and 9 percent of managerial positions. Furthermore, BLS statistics show that from 2010 to 2013, fatalities for Latino construction workers rose 20 percent, while during the same period, deaths for non-Latinos fell.
In 2013, the AFL-CIO published a report on Latinos in the construction industry in New York. "A disproportionate number of Latinos and immigrants are disproportionately killed in fall accidents in New York, according to a new study by the Center for Popular Democracy, because they work in construction in relatively high numbers; are concentrated in smaller, nonunion firms; and are over-represented in the contingent labor pool," according to the report.
In New York, skyscrapers have been around for more than a century, and laws were written to regulate the construction industry and protect workers high up in the sky. The longstanding Scaffold Law was enacted in 1885, but is recently under attack. Construction companies have been working hard to amend it, saying it is one-sided in not protecting the industry from workers' own negligence. According to a 2013New York Times article:
They argue that the law is antiquated and prejudicial against contractors and property owners, and essentially absolves employees of responsibility for their own accidents, leading to huge settlements. The payouts, they contend, have in turn led to skyrocketing insurance premiums that are hampering construction and the state's economic growth.
But also in 2013, industry publication Durability + Design conversely reported that the industry had just been successful in reducing its penalties regarding a significant 2009 mast climber accident that resulted in fatalities.
Nearly five years after three EIFS applicators fell to their deaths from a high-rise construction site in Austin, TX, a judge has ordered the scaffolding company in charge to pay $17,150 in fines. Mast Climber Manufacturing Inc. d/b/a American Mast Climbers, of Whitney, TX, contested the 2009 citations (eight serious, one willful) issued for safety hazards after the accident. The penalties originally totaled $86,800. In the Jan. 29 ruling, Administrative Law Judge Ken S. Welch affirmed the willful violation and two serious violations involving lift equipment set up at the site. The parties agreed to settle three serious violations, and the judge vacated the rest.
In right-to-work North Carolina, people in general have more limited recourse in the workplace and the courts, and immigrants may be at a distinct disadvantage when asserting their rights. A 2012 study entitled "Employer provision of personal protective equipment [PPE] to Latino workers in North Carolina residential construction" states its "results suggest that the residential construction subsector generally fails to provide [Latino] workers with PPE at no cost, as is required by regulation."
Working side by side on a narrow platform high above the street on March 23, the men who lost their lives and their injured companion worked for at least three different companies. Brazilian Anderson Almeida and Elmer Guevara from El Salvador worked for Associated Scaffolding and Equipment, while José Hernández of Honduras and José Luís López from Mexico worked for Juba Aluminum/ Janna Walls and Kea Contracting. These subcontractors were employed by the site's general contractor, Choate Construction. The property is owned by Dominion Realty.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), using multiple subcontractors is a way to hide worker abuse as well as shield companies from culpability.
[W]orkers who try to stand up for their rights often find themselves frustrated by multiple layers of subcontractors and middlemen - an arrangement that seems designed to insulate corporations at the top from accountability for the mistreatment of workers. The same phenomenon was seen repeatedly in New Orleans with contractors working to clean up the city after Hurricane Katrina.
In a federal ruling, the SPLC won a case against Del Monte on behalf of agricultural workers, successfully arguing that "... the labor contractor and the workers were really employees of the Del Monte subsidiary and that the company was indeed responsible for any wage abuses that could be proven. The federal ruling was an important milestone for workers, but the fact remains that most Latino farmworkers in the South have little or no access to legal representation."
Speaking to television news station Notícias 40 in Durham, Olvia López tearfully explained that her husband José Luís, father of their three children, had expressed fear about the conditions at his job, but felt he had no choice but to go to work. The station also indicated that José Hernández leaves behind a wife and two young children who depend upon him in Honduras, where he had intended to return in November, while Anderson Almeida had a partner, child and stepchild. The family of Elmer Guevara has instructed the hospital to withhold information about their loved one at this time.
In a growing memorial, a cardboard sign erected near the Charter Square buildingread, "While we run from a corrupt government, we put our lives on the line in the chase of the American dream. RIP fellow dreamers."
It may have been placed by the NC Dream Team, made up of Dreamers, like the brave Viridiana Martínez, Loida Silva and Rosario López, who held a hunger strike in 2010 not far from the site of the accident. After Viridiana qualified for the Dream Act, or DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), she went on to report from inside an immigration detention facility and helped identify and liberate women who were eligible for US residency. Dreamers are the children of immigrants who were born abroad but grew up in the United States and want to continue their education as Americans.
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Exposing the Charter School Lie: Michelle Rhee, Louis C.K. and the Year Phony Education Reform Revealed its True Colors
Salon - January 1, 2015, by Jeff Bryant - Since it’s the time of the year when newspapers, websites and television talk...
Salon - January 1, 2015, by Jeff Bryant - Since it’s the time of the year when newspapers, websites and television talk shows scan their archives to pick the person, place or thing that sums up the year in entertainment, business, sports or every other venue, why not do that for education too?
In 2014 education news, lots of personalities came and went.
Michelle Rhee gave way to Campbell Brown as a torchbearer for “reform.” The comedian Louis C. K. had a turn at becoming an education wonk with his commentary on the Common Core standards. Numerous “Chiefs for Change” toppled from the ranks of chiefdom. Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett went down in defeat due in part to his gutting of public schools, as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker remained resilient while spreading the cancerous voucher program from Milwaukee to the rest of the state.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio rose to turn back the failed education reforms of ex-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, only to have his populist agenda blocked by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo who insisted on imposing policies favored by Wall Street. Progressives formed Democrats for Public Education to counter the neoliberal, big money clout of Democrats for Education Reform. And Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush emerged as rival voices in the ongoing debate about the Common Core among potential Republican presidential candidates.
But hogging the camera throughout the year was another notable character: charter school scandals.
In 2014, charter schools, which had always been marketed for a legendary ability to deliver promising new innovations for education, became known primarily for their ability to concoct innovative new scams.
From Local Stories to National Scandal
Troubling news stories about the financial workings of charter schools had been leaking slowly into the media stream for some years.
A story that appeared at Forbes in late 2013 foretold a lot of what would emerge in 2014. That post “Charter School Gravy Train Runs Express to Fat City” brought to light for the first time in a mainstream source the financial rewards that were being mined from charter schools. As author Addison Wiggin explained, a mixture of tax incentives, government programs and Wall Street investors eager to make money were coming together to deliver a charter school bonanza – especially if the charter operation could “escape scrutiny” behind the veil of being privately held or if the charter operation could mix its business in “with other ventures that have nothing to do with education.”
As 2014 began, more stories about charter schools scandals continued to drip out from local press outlets – a chain of charter schools teaching creationism, a charter school closing abruptly for mysterious reasons, a charter high school operating as a for-profit “basketball factory,” recruiting players from around the world while delivering a sub-par education.
Here and there, stories emerged: a charter school trying to open up inside the walls of a gated community while a closed one continued to get more than $2 million in taxpayer funds. Stories about charter operators being found guilty of embezzling thousands of taxpayer dollars turned into other stories about operators stealing even more thousands of dollars, which turned into even more stories about operators stealing over a million dollars.
While some charter schools schemed to steer huge percentages of their money away from instruction toward management salaries and property leases (to firms connected to the charter owners, of course), others worked the system to make sure fewer students with special needs were in their classrooms.
Then the steady drip-drip from local news sources turned into a fire hose in May when a blockbuster report released by Integrity in Education and the Center for Popular Democracy revealed, “Fraudulent charter operators in 15 states are responsible for losing, misusing, or wasting over $100 million in taxpayer money.”
The report, “Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud And Abuse,” combed through news stories, criminal records and other documents to find hundreds of cases of charter school operators embezzling funds, using tax dollars to illegally support other, non-educational businesses, taking public dollars for services they didn’t provide, inflating their enrollment numbers to boost revenues, and putting children in potential danger by forgoing safety regulations or withholding services.
The report made charter school scandals a nationwide story and received in-depth coverage at Salon, “Bill Moyers and Company,” the Washington Post and the Nation.
A Summer of Scams
Charter schools scandals continued to break throughout the summer.
In Ohio, report after report continued to reveal how popular charter school chains like White Hat Management had sky-high dropout rates while they poured public money into advertising campaigns and executive pay.
In Pennsylvania, a report found exorbitant costs associated with charter school operations and lavish CEO salaries and bonuses for charter school operators despite vastly underperforming the state’s traditional public schools. Another report revealed how Pennsylvania charters had gamed the system for special education funding, resulting in annual profits of $200 million to the schools.
In Michigan, a series by the Detroit Free Press found charter schools with “wasteful spending and double-dipping. Board members, school founders and employees steering lucrative deals to themselves or insiders. Schools allowed to operate for years despite poor academic records.”
In Florida, an investigation by the Orlando Sun Sentinel found, “Unchecked charter-school operators are exploiting South Florida’s public school system, collecting taxpayer dollars for schools that quickly shut down.”
Another Florida local news outlet investigating charter school operations found millions of taxpayer dollars misdirected from classrooms and students to management companies. The report pointed to charter school chain Charter Schools USA that uses tax-exempt bonds to build schools that it then rents to UCSA-affiliated schools. Then the CUSA schools are saddled with rent payments back to CUSA and its management company at rates considerably higher than those charged to other non-CUSA schools in the area.
Still more news stories came out about charter schools related to the largest bricks-and-mortar charter-school chain in the United States run by the secretive Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, who lives in exile from Turkey in rural Pennsylvania. The Chicago Sun-Times reported that Chicago-area Concept Schools, part of the Gulen charter chain, were subjects of an ongoing federal investigation. The enquiry is about nearly $1 million that has been paid to contractors all with ties to the Gülen network.
Articles from the Washington Post found District of Columbia charter school operators evading rules to pocket millions in taxpayer dollars and charter schools pumping public money into for-profit management companies.
A report in the Arizona Republic found board members and administrators from more than a dozen charter schools “profiting from their affiliations by doing business with schools they oversee.”
The rash of summer charter scandal stories resonated in news outlets across the country.
Then to cap off the summer of charter scandals, the Progressive reported an upsurge in FBI raids on charter schools all over the country. “From Pittsburgh to Baton Rouge, from Hartford to Cincinnati to Albuquerque, FBI agents have been busting into schools, carting off documents, and making arrests leading to high-profile indictments.”
Reporter Ruth Conniff found charter schools allegations range from “taking money that was meant for the classroom,” to spending taxpayer dollars on “luxuries such as fine-dining and retreats at exclusive resorts and spas,” to engaging in “bribes and kickbacks.”
Back to Schools for Scandal
As back-to-school season rolled out, charter schools scandals broke harder and heavier.
The Center for Popular Democracy, Integrity in Education and ACTION United published a continuation of their charter schools study with a new report that disclosed charter school officials in Pennsylvania had defrauded at least $30 million intended for schoolchildren since 1997.
Startling examples of charter school financial malfeasance revealed by the authors included an administrator who diverted $2.6 million in school funds to a church property he also operated. Another charter school chief was caught spending millions in school funds to bail out other nonprofits associated with the school. A pair of charter school operators stole more than $900,000 from the school by using fraudulent invoices, and a cyberschool entrepreneur diverted $8 million of school funds for houses, a Florida condominium and an airplane.
Then, in November, the Center for Popular Democracy, with the Alliance for Quality Education, submitted yet another continuation of its analysis of charter school financial fraud, this time finding as much as $54 million in suspected charter school fraud in New York state.
Specific examples from the report included a New York City charter that issued credit cards to its executives allowing them to charge more than $75,000 in less than two years, a Long Island charter that paid vendors over half a million dollars without competitive bids, an Albany charter that lost between $207,000 to $2.3 million by purchasing a site for its elementary school rather than leasing it, a Rochester charter that awarded contracts to board members, relatives and other related parties rather than get competitive bids, and a Buffalo charter with a leasing arrangement that paid more than $5 million to a building company at a 20 percent interest rate.
A write-up of the report in the New York Daily News noted CPD “investigators uncovered probable financial mismanagement in 95 percent of the [charter] schools they examined.”
More recently, a widely circulated report from progressive news outlet ProPublica revealed how charter schools increasingly use arrangements known as “sweeps” contracts to send nearly all of a school’s public dollars – anywhere from 95 to 100 percent — into for-profit charter-management companies.
Reporter Marian Wang wrote, “The contracts are an example of how the charter schools sometimes cede control of public dollars to private companies that have no legal obligation to act in the best interests of the schools or taxpayers … it can be hard for regulators and even schools themselves to follow the money when nearly all of it goes into the accounts of a private company.”
The New Face of Charter Schools
In their defense, charter school advocates object to the negative portrayals of their operations by claiming the reports cherry-pick bad actors from the broad population of charters. But this year’s avalanche of malfeasance should dispel any argument about cherry-picking.
For sure there are examples of charter schools that are doing an excellent job of educating students. But rapid growth in the industry continues to come from charter operators who are not willing to run their operations like these successful charters because it doesn’t suit their “business model.”
Further, would a public school advocate defend public schools by countering, “But look at this good one over here”? They would be mocked and derided by charter school proponents.
Advocates for charter schools also defend the explosion in charter schools scandals by pointing to scandals in a public school and contending, “Look, they do it too.” Indeed, there are instances of financial and other types of scandals in public schools. That’s why they are heavily regulated. Yet charter school backers continue to fight regulations, contribute big money to political candidates who promise a hands-off approach to their schools, and use powerful lobbying firms to coerce legislators to continue unregulated charter governance.
Charter school defenders also argue that these widespread scandals will be remedied by the “market” – that the inevitable “bad” charters will get closed while only the “good” ones remain. It’s true that charter school closures are becoming more commonplace, but charter operators often resist closures – even calling on parents to rally to their cause and appeal to local authorities. Charter schools that close abruptly leave schoolchildren and families in the lurch and severely interrupt the students’ learning. Operators of closed charters often flee the scene to practice their malfeasance elsewhere, taking with them the supplies and materials they obtained at taxpayer expense. Meanwhile, enormous sums of precious public money are wasted – with no apparent education benefit – all for the sake of this “market churn.”
As a result of the flood of charter schools scandals, public attitudes about these schools are bound to change.
Surveys show the public generally doesn’t get what charter schools are and don’t understand whether they are private or public or whether they can charge fees or teach religion. Charter operators themselves have muddled their image by arguing successfully in numerous confrontations with legal authorities that “they are exempt from rules that govern traditional public schools, ranging from labor laws to constitutional protections for students.”
But a recent poll in Michigan, a state where rampant charter fraud has been well publicized, found that 73 percent of responders say they want a moratorium on the creation of new charter schools. In many communities, announcements about new charter operations opening up have been greeted with outspoken public protests as we’ve seen in in Nashville; York, Pennsylvania; and Camden, New Jersey.
Forecasts about what 2015 will bring to the education landscape frequently foresee more charter schools as charter-friendly lawmakers continue to act witlessly to proliferate these schools. But make no mistake, the charter school scandals of 2014 forever altered the narrative about what these institutions really bring to the populace.
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Arizona's Minimum-Wage Initiative Saved by Political Consultant's Inheritance
Arizona's Minimum-Wage Initiative Saved by Political Consultant's Inheritance
The campaign manager for a group trying to raise Arizona's minimum wage said on Wednesday that the effort was helped...
The campaign manager for a group trying to raise Arizona's minimum wage said on Wednesday that the effort was helped considerably by his own timely loan of $100,000.
Bill Scheel is one of three founding partners of the public-relations and political-strategy firm Javelina, which Arizonans for Fair Wages and Healthy Families hired to run its campaign. The Phoenix-based firm got the job done in the form of Proposition 206, which will appear on the November 8 ballot.
Preliminary state campaign-finance records show that Bright Owl, a limited liability company of which Scheel is the sole member and manager, made a $100,000 contribution to the campaign on August 4.
Asked on Wednesday about the cash infusion, Scheel said the money is an interest-free loan, not a donation, and that it will be classified as such on the campaign's official pre-primary report, which is due to the state on Friday.
According to Scheel, the loan came in the nick of time to cover legal fees for an unexpected court challenge to the initiative, and was made possible by money he inherited after his parents died a few years ago.
"I couldn't think of a better way to honor their memory than to provide this loan, which has helped get our Healthy Working Families initiative on the ballot," he said.
If Arizona voters approve the measure, the state's minimum wage would go up to $10 an hour next year and rise to $12 in 2020.
But it almost didn't make the ballot. The Arizona Restaurant Association sued, claiming many of the petition gatherers hired by the campaign ineligible to collect signatures. The association wanted tens of thousands of signatures thrown out, potentially enough to knock the initiative off the ballot.
The campaign itself was in need of a raise.
Before Scheel's loan, the two largest payments to the campaign were a July 19 donation of $25,000 from the United Food and Commercial Workers union Region 8 States Council, and a May 12 donation of $25,000 from the California-based Fairness Project. Prior to that, records show, from January 1 to May 31, the effort was funded with $384,642 donated by the nonprofit activist group Living United for Change in Arizona, (LUCHA), which reportedly received money for the effort from the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Popular Democracy.
During that same period in the first half of 2016, the group spent $337,975.59 on signature gatherers, printing services, and other expenses, including $3,000 in consulting fees paid to Tomas Robles, the campaign's chairman and LUCHA's executive director.
Scheel says the campaign pays his company $10,000 a month for campaign management, plus another $5,000 a month for communications, all of which is split by several people at Javelina.
On top of all those expenses came the legal bills for the lawsuit by the restaurant association.
"We didn't have money set aside for legal expenses," Scheel explained, adding that his loan was a "huge help" to the campaign. It was also a risk to put his own money on the line, he admitted.
"If the court had ruled against us last Friday, my $100,000 would be gone," he said. "Legal fees is basically what [the money] was spent on."
Arizona's Minimum-Wage Initiative Saved by Political Consultant's Inheritance
Arizonans for Fair Wages and Healthy Families
The group's tenacity, along with Scheel's inheritance money, paid off in the courtroom. Last week, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge dismissed the lawsuit because the association filed the complaint seven days after the signatures were submitted to the Arizona Secretary of State's Office, exceeding the statutory limit of five days.
Now, the website for Arizonans for Fair Wages and Healthy Families lists Bright Owl as a major funding source, along with LUCHA, the UCFW, and the Fairness Project.
Scheel, who hasn't made any other contributions to the campaign, expects to be repaid out of donations that come in between now and November, he said.
"There will be future donations coming into the campaign from donors," he said. "About $1.5 million."
In response to questions from New Times, he said he hasn't made any deals with the unions and activist groups behind the campaign, nor does he expect anything in return other than repayment, if the group can manage it. His loan simply came at the right time and was a "huge help" to the legal effort that saved the initiative, he said.
"This really is a labor of love for me," Scheel said. "When I work on a campaign, I go all in. I want it to succeed."
By Ray Stern
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Pittsburgh to host progressive activists, leaders at National People’s Convention
Pittsburgh to host progressive activists, leaders at National People’s Convention
In Seattle’s 2013 election, Nick Licata broke the city’s record for the most votes received citywide for a city...
In Seattle’s 2013 election, Nick Licata broke the city’s record for the most votes received citywide for a city councilor in a contested race. That same year he was named the country’s Most Valuable Local Official on The Nation’s list of most valuable progressives.
During his time on council, Licata sponsored and passed legislation like paid sick leave and supported a plan to raise Seattle’s minimum wage to $15 an hour, two social-justice objectives sought by activists around the country. At the end of last year, the veteran Seattle city councilor retired after 18 years in office.
That’s not the end of Licata’s social-justice crusade, however. This week he’ll visit Pittsburgh to attend two conventions on social-justice issues and share insights from his recently released book, Becoming a Citizen Activist.
“My primary mission right now,” says Licata, “is to work with both citizens and elected [officials] to recognize that no matter what happens after November, it’s critical that we maintain an activist space at the local level, because we’ve shown at the local level we can accomplish things, and we can continue to accomplish things no matter who is president.”
Pittsburgh and other cities haven’t seen as much progress on paid sick leave and the Fight for $15 as has Licata’s native Seattle. Pittsburgh City Council passed a paid-sick-leave bill last year, but a judge struck it down in December as unenforceable. And while the city and some employers have raised their minimum wage to $15 an hour, a mandatory minimum wage citywide is a ways away.
But Pittsburgh must be doing something right because it was selected to host those two social-justice conventions. The People’s Convention will bring more than 40 national activist organizations to the city, while the Local Progress Convening will see the arrival of hundreds of progressive municipal elected officials.
“Pittsburgh was identified as a place where [the] movement is very real,” says Erin Kramer, executive director of social-justice group One Pittsburgh. “There’s more workers organizing per capita in Pittsburgh than any other city in the country right now. There’s something happening in Pittsburgh right now, and folks want to come see it and learn from it.”
The pairing of the events isn’t an accident. They’re both sponsored by the Center for Popular Democracy, a group that works to build alliances between progressive organizations and politicians. Participants say collaboration between the two bodies is integral to ensuring progressive laws are passed and enacted.
“It is very important for elected officials who are trying to advance social change to have a direct understanding of the specific concerns of communities,” says Ana Maria Archila, co-executive director of Popular Democracy. “And it’s very important for community members to have relationships with elected officials. We know in the places where working families are winning we need both the pressure on the outside and the strategy on the inside.”
Jimmy John’s employee Chris Ellis has worked in the fast-food industry for more than two decades and has become a leader in the local Fight for $15. At the People’s Convention next week, he’ll have the opportunity to meet leaders from movements in other cities throughout the country.
“[I hope to learn] better organizing skills not just for the Fight for $15 movement but for all movements in general,” Ellis says. “I’m the type of person who sees myself trying to organize other fights, because once this fight is over, I’m looking for other fights.”
The interconnectedness of social-justice issues is widely recognized by activists. The People’s Convention will focus on topics like workers’ rights, health care, gun violence and education — issues that One Pittsburgh, which is part of the hosting committee, has been working on for more than a decade. The idea is to collaborate on these issues to build momentum and produce results.
“In Pittsburgh there’s lots of progressive work on half-a-dozen different issues at any given time, and increasingly those organizations are building partnerships with each other,” says Kramer, from One Pittsburgh. “We’ve been getting together to learn from each other and build our campaigns together. What I think folks are increasingly realizing is whether it’s housing, minimum wage or education justice, it’s really the same people who need to come together to build power to build a city that works for all of us.”
The event will develop strategies for appealing to lawmakers, but will also address barriers in cities where the majority of elected officials are already supportive of social-justice movements.
“Increasingly, we find ourselves literally preempted from solving problems at the local level by state legislatures that are unfriendly to the solutions we would propose,” says Kramer. “A good example is where we passed paid-sick-day legislation for tens of thousands of people in Pittsburgh and immediately it goes in front of the court because the restaurant association [the Pennsylvania Restaurant and Lodging Association] objects. The reason we don’t have a $15-an-hour minimum wage for the vast majority of Pennsylvanians is because you can’t do that at the city level.”
Combating these barriers that stifle progress at the municipal level — and particularly, developing strategies for fighting lawsuits against progressive laws — is something that will be discussed at the Local Progress convention this weekend as well.
“It’s the strategy,” says Licata, a Local Progress co-founder. “It’s smart on [the opposition’s] part, and I think that’s what we’ll see in other cities — corporate strategy to try to limit [these laws]. What I would like to see as we see more of these lawsuits being filed is Local Progress use our network to work on national strategies to fight these corporate challenges through the court system.”
To ensure laws fall within a city’s jurisdiction, Local Progress has also been holding workshops to examine the power that states hold over local municipalities. And they’re also looking into legislation that is being passed to further limit cities’ rights.
“As a rule of thumb, cities are creatures of the state,” says Licata. “Over half the states limit the authority of cities, and one of the ongoing battles we’re having that impacts local politics is the whole issue of states limiting citizens’ rights. We’ve been fighting on that. It’s a major concern.”
Ultimately, as a former activist turned politician turned activism author, Licata says the intersection of the two events and collaboration is important to ensuring that things like paid sick leave and a $15-an-hour minimum wage are realized.
“People at the People’s Convention and the politicians at Local Progress are literally the same people. A lot of the people at Local Progress were activists,” he says. “When someone gets elected to office, people who got the person elected to office think he or she will take care of the problems, and the person who gets elected thinks, ‘Oh, I have to act differently.’ But you have to continue organizing and use the power you get as an elected official to amplify your organizing.
“Government is a tool. It’s not an end-product. I think getting into office does give you more power, but you want to distribute that power so other people have access to power. The main ask of progressive politicians who want to build communities is to disperse the power that was given to them to as many people as possible.”
According to Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, who as city councilor joined Local Progress nearly a decade ago, the group can counterbalance those organizations that are trying to get conservative legislation passed.
“Certainly we’ve learned from other cities through these organizations,” says Peduto. “We hear a lot about ALEC [American Legislative Exchange Council] and how it is a network that is putting state legislatures into very conservative, Tea Party-type of policies, and it networks nationally. Well, this is the answer, and these organizations have become the network that helps progressive policies to work their way into implementation in city halls. And the fact that they chose Pittsburgh to do it shows that we are a part of that network and one of the areas that the rest of the country looks towards.”
Like Peduto, event organizer Popular Democracy hopes its network of activists and politicians will have the ability to shape the future of the country.
“It’s a really important moment politically because our nation is at a crossroads between the politics of hate and xenophobia and the politics of opportunity and interdependence,” says Popular Democracy’s Archila. “We are in the process of a presidential election where the issues that matter to the working-class community are really centrally positioned in the debate. How the solutions are advanced will depend on who is in motion. And we will have in Pittsburgh thousands of people who are in motion across the country and who are helping define the debate for what’s possible in their cities.”
By Rebecca Addison
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Major Impact Seen from Mayor’s Carve-Out of Deportation Defense Program
Major Impact Seen from Mayor’s Carve-Out of Deportation Defense Program
When families are brought into the court-room at Varick Street Immigration Court, they see their loved ones seated side...
When families are brought into the court-room at Varick Street Immigration Court, they see their loved ones seated side-by-side on a bench with other detainees, clad in orange jumpsuits, hands shackled.
As those detainees are called one by one to have their cases heard, they are seated across the table from an attorney representing the Department of Homeland Security. DHS attorneys will be prepared with documentation and arguments meant to portray the detainee as a flight risk—someone liable to skip further hearings if released—and a danger to society. They will discuss prior convictions, residences, details on family members’ citizenship and criminal history.
Read the full article here.
‘May You Die in Pain,’ Voter Tells GOP Lawmaker
‘May You Die in Pain,’ Voter Tells GOP Lawmaker
An angry voter had harsh words for Rep. Doug LaMalfa, R-Calif., at a town hall meeting on Monday: "May you die in pain...
An angry voter had harsh words for Rep. Doug LaMalfa, R-Calif., at a town hall meeting on Monday: "May you die in pain," the voter said, scolding the California Republican for his support of a House GOP plan to repeal Obamacare.
The biting remark from the elderly constituent, who was holding a sign that read "Lackey for the Rich!" was one of several intense moments from a passionate group of about 400 residents during the gathering in Chico, according to The Los Angeles Times.
Read the full article here.
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