CPD IN THE NEWS

Times Union - September 3, 2014, by Casey Seiler - SUNY's Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government has released a second draft of its controversial report on New York's Scaffold Law. According to the Institute's Deputy Director for Operations Robert Bullock, it's the only remaining version of the report that was shared with the report's funder, the state Lawsuit Reform Alliance.

The business-backed group, which opposes Scaffold Law, paid $82,800 to fund the report — sponsorship that has led critics to attack the study as advocacy in the guise of research. Its authors, however, insist the research was conducted in good faith.

Scaffold Law, which places "absolute liability" on employers for gravity-related workplace injuries, is supported by labor unions but opposed by business groups that claim it needlessly drives up construction costs — a thesis backed up in part by the report. Opponents would like to see New York follow other states by adopting a "comparative negligence" standard that would make workers proportionately responsible when their actions contribute to an accident.

The Center for Popular Democracy, a labor-backed group that supports Scaffold Law, lambasted the report upon its release last winter and requested copies of all communications between the institute and the Lawsuit Reform Alliance. That FOIL request produced a series of emails between researchers and LRA Executive Director Tom Stebbins, including Stebbins' suggested edits to a June 25, 2013, draft copy of the report that was not initially released by the institute.

The center appealed to SUNY, which ultimately released the June 25 draft. A comparison of the draft and the final report suggested that some of Stebbins' suggestions were reflected in the final version. Researchers, however, said any changes were the result of their efforts to sharpen their analysis, and not made due to pressure from the funder.

The newly released draft, dated Aug. 7, 2013, closely resembles the final report.

The center's Josie Duffy claims the six-week gap between the first and second drafts suggests that the institute moved quickly to follow the alliance's edits.

"SUNY says it has now disclosed everything it has, but given that LRANY and the authors held weekly conference calls to discuss the report's progress, we may never know the full extent of their influence over the final version," she said.

In an email, Bullock said the institute "has been open and honest about its contacts with funders and its research has been and will continue to be immune from influence."

"It is unfortunate," he added, "that a research organization known throughout the nation for the quality and character of its work should have to defend itself from accusations leveled by the Center for Popular Democracy, an organization well known for its partisanship."

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Community organizer Wintana Melekin was grabbing a soda in late June at a coffee shop near her office when she heard Neel Kashkari, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, had just been in.

Seeing her chance, she dashed out the door after Kashkari, caught up and asked if he would meet with her organization, Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, to discuss racial and economic disparities in the Twin Cities.

He agreed, and to confirm that he meant it, retweeted Melekin’s tweet saying he was willing to meet.

On Wednesday, the meeting happened. Kashkari sat down with about a dozen people at NOC’s offices in north Minneapolis and committed to an ongoing collaboration between the Minneapolis Fed and some of the state’s most outspoken critics of a status quo in which blacks are not enjoying the benefits of economic growth.

“Some of the racial disparities are a crisis, and we need to treat them like a crisis,” Kashkari said. “One of the things I learned in 2008 is you don’t tackle a crisis with incremental solutions. You tackle a crisis with overwhelming force, and so if this is a crisis, and I think certainly parts of this are, then we need to bring overwhelming force.”

Kashkari, who became president of the Minneapolis Fed at the start of the year, is a former investment banker and Treasury official in the George W. Bush administration. He was appointed the first chief of the bank bailout program known as TARP at the end of the Bush term and start of President Obama’s administration.

Though his everyday work is at the very top of the national economy, Kashkari has a record of trying to understand its depths. As a candidate for governor in California two years ago, Kashkari spent a week living on the streets of Fresno, a midsize city, with just $40. He tried unsuccessfully to find work during that week and wound up in a homeless shelter.

It’s not clear how Kashkari and the nation’s central bank can directly address the challenges that were brought up at Wednesday’s meeting. The Fed controls interest rates, with the goal of creating maximum employment, but monetary policy can’t be targeted at segments of the population or certain states or cities. As Kashkari pointed out, black unemployment in the United States stubbornly tracks at roughly twice the level of white unemployment.

“There’s something structural in the U.S. economy, in good times and bad, that black unemployment is almost always twice as high as white unemployment,” Kashkari said.

He said driving unemployment downward will help everyone, and he is for low interest rates as long as they aren’t driving inflation upward. But he has not heard a satisfying answer for why the disparity in Minnesota is worse than in most places, though he committed to working with NOC to understand why it is.

From NOC’s perspective, the meeting with Kashkari was historic. Never before has a Fed president met face to face with its members in Minneapolis. As local ambassadors for the national Fed Up campaign, the organization has a fresh interest in the Fed and has taken the position that interest rates should remain low.

For Anthony Newby, the head of the organization, the meeting was a good starting point. Kashkari’s comment that the economic plight of black Minnesotans is a crisis requiring a response of “overwhelming force” was particularly satisfying.

“It sets the tone for how the Fed could, in unusual and unorthodox ways, use its power and position to solve some of these equity problems,” Newby said.

Kashkari agreed to spend a day with Rosheeda Credit, a mother of five at the meeting who said she struggles to pay for rent and child care. “The crime rate is high here, and the rent is high here and we’re not getting paid enough to work here,” Credit said.

He heard from Tenice Hodges, a former teacher who moved back to Minneapolis two months ago to help her sister’s family. She is living out of her car until she can get a teaching job because she can’t afford the city’s high rents with her restaurant wages.

“We are struggling out here,” Hodges said. “Yes, I’m employed. I work every day. But can I go out and get an apartment right now? No. I don’t have $1,100 by myself, or $2,200 for a deposit.”

Kashkari committed to looking closely at the résumés of people of color that NOC submitted for various board appointments at the Minneapolis Fed. He also said he will work with NOC on research and meet with people from the organization again in the future. He also committed to attending a workshop put on by groups affiliated with NOC at the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium, an annual conference in Wyoming where central bankers from around the world gather.

Kashkari, who has drawn national attention by calling for a transformative solution to the problem of banks that are too big to fail, explained that his role as a regional Fed president is to understand the problems people face in his district. While the tools of monetary policy are limited, and much of the heavy lifting that causes social change much happen in Congress, he said it is important for him to meet with people as he did Wednesday to understand their concerns.

“I appreciate that you think it is business as usual,” Newby told Kashkari. “I don’t think it is business as usual.”

By ADAM BELZ

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Ady Barkan, an ALS-stricken progressive activist whose “Be A Hero” initiative targets Republicans who voted for, or back the tax cuts, traveled to the district to campaign on Tipirneni’s behalf. While in Arizona, Barkan, who will need Medicare as his body deteriorates, asked Lesko to respond to the stated intentions of several Republican leaders, including House Speaker Ryan and White House budget director Mick Mulvaney, to seek major cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Read the full article here.

Raising the minimum wage. More paid sick leave and family leave. More stable scheduling for workers. When a major Republican-friendly polling shop surveyed CEOs across the country about these typically left-leaning policies, one thing was made clear: they overwhelmingly support them.

So when it came to presenting the results to the Council of State Chambers of Commerce, which commissioned the research, the pollsters had a challenge on their hands — how to reconcile the widespread opposition to these policies by many business lobby groups with their popularity among the people actually running businesses.

In a recorded webinar, David Merritt, the managing director of polling firm LuntzGlobal, described the “empathy” CEOs feel for workers along with their support for labor-friendly policies. “If you ask about them in isolation, of course we want to take care of people who are caring for a loved one. Of course we want to give folks more benefits or more leave or more income.”

In the presentation, obtained by liberal advocacy group the Center for Media and Democracy, Merritt told the business lobbyists that executives expressed widespread support for a number of policies that are vehemently opposed by conservative politicians.

Based on their survey of 1,000 executives, LuntzGlobal found 80% supported raising their state minimum wage, 82% supported increasing paid parental leave requirements and 73% supported increasing paid sick leave. The Washington Post first reported details of the presentation.

 “If you’re fighting against a minimum wage increase, you’re fighting an uphill battle,” Merritt said in the presentation. “Because most Americans, even most Republicans, support raising a minimum wage.”

He went on to coach participants on how to oppose those policies anyhow.

“A lot of you guys have minimum wage battles at the state level. If you are fighting those fights, the best way to fight it is not to talk about the minimum wage,” he said. “If you can, turn it into a federal issue and talk about the Earned Income Tax Credit.”

Joe Crosby, Director of the Council of State Chambers, which commissioned the research, said in a statement that the survey was intended “to benchmark trends on current political issues” and “it primarily covered mid-sized and larger companies, not the smaller businesses that are most affected by wage and leave mandates.”

LuntzGlobal, founded by prominent Republican pollster and consultant Frank Luntz, was unable to comment, per the terms of its contract wit the Council of State Chambers, Crosby said.

“We have known for years”

Advocates for these worker-friendly policies said the findings are proof their cause has many allies in the business community — even if those allies aren’t often the most outspoken voices representing business interests in Washington and state houses.

“We have known for years what this research confirms: that an overwhelming share of business leaders support paid sick days, paid leave and other family friendly policies,” said Debra L. Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families, a group that advocates for paid leave.

At one point in the call, Merritt held up language from the group Ness belongs to (below) as polling higher among executives than any other.

 “I wouldn’t have changed anything about this statement,” Merritt said in the presentation. “This was the clear winner — from the National Partnership for Women and Families… Perfect, perfect language.”

Business lobby groups like the various state-level chambers of commerce are “not currently representing the views of their members — and doing that at the expense of single moms and hard-working parents,” said Elianne Farhat, who runs the Fair Workweek Initiative, a campaign of the Center For Popular Democracy, a liberal advocacy group. “In every place fair workweek laws are moving, the chambers of commerce have been the loudest voices of opposition.”

But Crosby, the Director of the Council of State Chambers, said the real question at issue is whether labor regulations should be forced onto all businesses by law, not whether businesses support the goal of better pay and working conditions. “Of course business owners support raising wages and benefits for their employees; those are goals they work for every day,” he wrote in an email to BuzzFeed News. “But one-size-fits-all government mandates simply don’t work.”

A spokesperson for the National Restaurant Association, the industry’s largest trade group and one of the loudest voices opposing minimum wake hikes, said its members are more sensitive to labor costs than those in other industries. “The Council of State Chambers represents a diverse range of businesses, including tech and manufacturing companies, that could adapt to increased labor costs more easily” than restaurant and fast food owners, said NRA spokesperson Christin Fernandez.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the federal body representing the country’s business community, echoed concerns that pro-labor policies would negatively affect employers.

“The U.S. Chamber, based on input from our members, continues to believe that imposing higher labor costs on employers, especially small businesses, will force them to cut back elsewhere, and will ultimately price low and un-skilled workers out of entry level job opportunities,” said Randy Johnson, senior vice president of Labor, Immigration, and Employee Benefits for the Chamber, in a statement.

Asked about the chamber’s position on paid family and sick leave, as well as predictive scheduling, all of which polled well in the survey, spokeswoman Blair Holmes wrote that the Chamber is “careful to be responsive and in synch” with the business community it represents.

“The only point we will make is to say we have not lobbied on these issues in any of the states,” she said, adding that the federal group “is not in a position to comment on the positions these state chambers may have taken” with respect to raising the minimum wage or paid leave and “will not comment on state or local versions of predictive scheduling legislation.”

On its website, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce lists among its 2016 priorities: “Oppose efforts to increase the minimum wage and to index the minimum wage to inflation,” and “Oppose attempts to make FMLA [Family and Medical Leave Act] leave paid or to mandate paid sick leave.”

By Cora Lewis

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