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
Where Trump’s Policies Sow Fear, New Campaign Argues, "Corporate Backers of Hate" Stand to Profit
Where Trump’s Policies Sow Fear, New Campaign Argues, "Corporate Backers of Hate" Stand to Profit
Last month, immigrant and workers’ rights groups, led by the Center for Popular Democracy and Make the Road New York,...
Last month, immigrant and workers’ rights groups, led by the Center for Popular Democracy and Make the Road New York, launched the “Corporate Backers of Hate” campaign. The groups are targeting nine corporations that, activists argue, stand to profit off of policies pushed by President Donald Trump. These include several companies whose CEOs sit on the president’s Business Council.
“We are launching this campaign today because we know the extent to which President Trump is able to implement his anti-immigrant, anti-worker agenda actually depends heavily on how much collaboration he is able to muster,” said Ana Maria Archila, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, during a press conference. “On immigration, for instance, the White House will rely on the work of private companies to provide the funding, software, and manpower to ramp up deportations, to build detention facilities, and to build a border wall.”
Read the full article here.
Commentary: Emeryville action could change working world
Like many people, when the alarm goes off, I hit snooze a few times and wish for more sleep. But what gets me out of...
Like many people, when the alarm goes off, I hit snooze a few times and wish for more sleep. But what gets me out of bed is that precious hour I have with my young son. We eat breakfast together, we race to see who can get dressed first, and then I walk him to school.
I’m lucky– as a salaried employee at an organization that values flexibility and family, I can arrange my schedule around my son if need be. But for people working low-wage hourly jobs, that kind of control over their scheduling is virtually unheard of.
Today, corporations that pay low wages rarely provide their employees with full-time work or reliable hours. Take Manuel, who works at one of Emeryville’s many retail chains. He had his hours cut from 20 a week down to four, and then nothing for two weeks — throwing his family into massive debt.
Emeryville may be the first city in the East Bay to change that, where the City Council is voting on a Fair Workweek policy on Oct. 18. This is part of a simple set of standards needed to ensure that working people can afford to stay in the East Bay region.
What is a Fair Workweek? It means employers must provide reliable, predictable hours so their employees can budget. Workers get schedules two weeks in advance so they can plan childcare, second jobs, family time, and even rest. And when more hours are available, current employees get priority so they can get closer to full-time work.
In Emeryville, the policy would only apply to large companies with more than 12 locations worldwide. These simple improvements would cost employers almost nothing if they follow the law and have a huge impact on the lives of thousands of Emeryville workers. Hundreds of thousands more working people would benefit if other East Bay cities follow suit.
Emeryville’s own Economic Development Advisory Committee – the city’s business advisory group – said even they agree that increasing stability of schedules, reducing employee turnover, and decreasing underemployment in Emeryville is important. And that’s what a Fair Workweek policy would do.
Many companies are already doing the right thing. This policy would reinforce that good behavior and target companies that are bad actors. However, global, multi-billion dollar corporations and their lobbyists are coming out against this low-cost policy, claiming it will kill the economic climate. But I wonder: how exactly would reliable schedules hurt companies like IKEA, The Gap or Home Depot?
Before the recession, big business painted doomsday scenarios saying that raising wages would force them to close shop. During the Great Recession, working people bore the brunt of tough times in the form of reduced pay, slashed benefits, and a cutback to part-time hours. And now that big business has not only recovered but is booming, companies are back to the mantra that improving standards for their workers will hurt them.
Common sense tells us that business — especially big business — is doing fine. Look at quarterly earning reports of Emeryville’s global retail chains. Sales tax revenue in Emeryville was up 2.4 percent in 2015 compared to the previous year according to the city’s Finance Department. Retail vacancies in the region are at a post-recession low of 6 percent. And of course, there are growing lines of cars and customers coming in and out of Emeryville’s shopping centers.
While business is thriving, working people have waited long enough for something so very basic: a single job that pays enough with enough hours to allow folks to meet their basic needs.
Raising the minimum wage helped struggling workers. Now we must finish the job by providing reliable, predictable hours. This economic boom shouldn’t just be a boon for shareholders. It should also lift the working people who are the backbone of our economy.
By Jennifer Lin
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Yellen Meets With Activists Seeking Fed Reforms
ABC News - November 14, 2014, by Martin Crutsinger - A coalition of community groups and labor unions are "fed up" with...
ABC News - November 14, 2014, by Martin Crutsinger - A coalition of community groups and labor unions are "fed up" with the Federal Reserve.
More than two dozen activists demonstrated outside the Fed and then met with Chair Janet Yellen on Friday as part of a new campaign seeking policy reforms and a commitment to keep interest rates low until good jobs are plentiful for all workers. Although the labor market has steadily strengthened this year, wages have remained stagnant.
During the hour-long discussion with Yellen and three other Fed board members, coalition representatives discussed problems their communities were facing with high unemployment and weak wage growth.
Ady Barkan, one of the organizers of "Fed Up: The National Campaign for a Strong Economy," said Yellen and the other Fed officials listened but made no commitments about future Fed policy.
"It was a very good conversation," said Barkan, an attorney with the Center for Popular Democracy in Brooklyn. "They listened very intently, and they asked meaningful follow-up questions."
Fed officials confirmed that the meeting took place but declined to comment on the issues raised at the meeting.
The Fed's outreach to community activists was the latest move by Yellen to focus attention on lingering problems from the Great Recession. Wearing green tee-shirts with the phrase "What Recovery?" the group had protested outside of the Fed's headquarters on Constitution Avenue under the watchful eye of nine Fed security officers.
Members of the group, some of whom had demonstrated at a central bank gathering in August in Jackson Hole, Wyoming said it was important that Fed officials not be swayed by arguments that it needs to move quickly to raise interest rates to make sure inflation does not become a threat.
"The banks are the ones that crashed the economy ... but they're the ones who got the bonuses and the bailouts while workers and homeowners like me were left to drown," said Jean Andre, 48, of New York, who said he was having a tough time finding full-time work.
In addition to Yellen, the Fed officials who took part in the meeting were Fed Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer and Fed board members Jerome Powell and Lael Brainard.
Members of the coalition said about half of the meeting was taken up by their members telling stories about the difficulty in finding jobs, particularly in disadvantaged groups and communities dealing with unemployment much higher than the 5.8 percent national average.
The Fed officials also were presented a petition signed by 5,000 people around the country urging the central bank to keep interest rates low until the country reaches full employment.
The group also pushed for a more open process in the selection of presidents of the Fed's 12 regional banks. They say the current process is too secretive and dominated by officials from banks and other businesses with little input from the public. The regional presidents, along with Fed board members in Washington, participate in the deliberations to set interest rates.
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Democratic activist Ady Barkan launches six-figure ad blitz in CD8 race
Democratic activist Ady Barkan launches six-figure ad blitz in CD8 race
Ady Barkan, the progressive health care activist whose video pleadings with U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake last year briefly...
Ady Barkan, the progressive health care activist whose video pleadings with U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake last year briefly became a viral hit, is starting a group to tout select Democratic candidates across the country, starting with Hiral Tipirneni's congressional bid in Arizona.
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Why it’s hard to legislate good corporate behavior
San Francisco, the country’s premier laboratory for new Internet services, is also used to innovating in municipal...
San Francisco, the country’s premier laboratory for new Internet services, is also used to innovating in municipal regulation.
But in its latest experiment, it’s starting to find that legislating good corporate behavior isn’t as easy as pressing a button on your smartphone.
In July, the city started implementing a first-in-the-nation law aimed at curtailing the trend towards “just-in-time” scheduling, where managers call in employees to work on short notice. The new measure requires large chain retailers— such as Safeway and Walgreen’s — to publish schedules at least two weeks in advance, and to compensate employees with “predictability pay” if they make changes less than a week ahead of time. It also mandates that additional hours be offered to existing employees first before new hires are made, and that part-time workers be paid at the same rate as people who work full-time.
So far, it’s been easier to publish schedules than live up to the spirit of the law.
"The two-week notice seemed to be instituted right away, but the other stuff is lagging,” says Gordon Mar, director of San Francisco Jobs With Justice, a labor-backed group that pushed for the “Retail Workers Bill of Rights” and has been monitoring its implementation.
The sluggish response may be because fines don’t kick in until Oct. 3; the city is still hashing out the rules. But the spotty compliance so far highlights the difficulty of attempts to mandate worker-friendly practices — especially the kind that touch the most fundamental aspects of business operations, rather than those that simply require higher pay and better benefits.
San Francisco employers fought the new ordinance, but couldn’t prevent its passage. Now, they complain it’s impacting service.
“We’re hearing from members in San Francisco that it really is not working well at all,” says Ronald Fong, president of the California Grocers Association. Stores can’t always predict surges in foot traffic, which might be brought on a sunny day, leaving managers without the option to bring in more staff. That was a problem during the heat wave that swept over San Francisco this summer.
"Supplies weren’t able to get out to the shelves,” Fong says. "It just kind of snowballed, and our customers have a bad experience, or the stores lose sales.”
Some businesses don’t mind the rules in principle, but object to the red tape. "Everybody pretty much operates on a predictive schedule,” says Bill Dombrowski, president of the California Retailers Association. “But the process of implementing this, with offering the employees hours in writing and waiting three days for a response, it’s a lot of government intrusion into very minute detail.”
Also, not all industries schedule their workers in the same way. Milton Moritz is president of the National Association of Theatre Owners’ California and Nevada chapter, and says the theater business is by nature unpredictable, making the new law particularly difficult to comply with.
“We might not know until the Monday before the Friday a film shows, and even then we’re hiring, firing, scheduling people based on the business that film’s going to do,” Moritz says. “This ordinance flies in the face of all that. It really complicates the issue tremendously.”
The San Francisco ordinance hasn’t just been irritating for big companies. Some workers grumble the law discourages employers from offering extra shifts on short notice, because they would have to pay the last-minute schedule change penalty — even if workers would be happy for the chance to pick up more hours.
Rachel Deutsch, a senior staff attorney with the Center for Popular Democracy who has been helping local jurisdictions across the country craft fair-scheduling legislation, says that’s something that might change in future iterations.
"I think that’s the thing with any policy where it’s the first attempt to solve a complicated economic problem,” Deutsch says. "It’s been a learning process.”
So far, fair scheduling laws aren’t spreading as quickly as minimum wage and paid sick leave laws. A statewide bill in California failed a couple weeks ago, and no other local ordinances have passed besides San Francisco’s, though there are active campaigns in several cities including Minneapolis and Washington D.C.
Meanwhile, several companies have acted on their own to curb some of the practices that workers have found most disruptive, like on-call shifts, where workers have to be available even if they aren’t ultimately asked to work. But in some cases — like that of Starbucks, which committed to eliminating many of those practices — those voluntary changes haven’t been any more effectivethan government mandates.
Erin Hurley worked at Bath & Body Works and campaigned for an end to on-call shifts. After she left the job, parent company L Brands said it would stop the practice at Bath & Body Works as well as another of its chains, Victoria’s Secret. But Hurley says she’s heard from current workers that managers are still doing effectively the same thing, by asking employees to stay a little longer.
“On-call shifts were replaced with shift extensions,” says Hurley. “Basically what L Brands did was change the name of the practice.” Keeping people on-call is very convenient for employers, and letting it go can be easier said than done. (L Brands did not respond to a request for comment.)
Still, advocates in San Francisco think the Retail Workers Bill of Rights has already done some good, and will be more effective when the city’s enforcement kicks into high gear — just like overtime rules did, when companies got used to obeying them.
Take Michelle Flores, 21, who has worked part time at Safeway for two years to support herself while in going to college. Unpredictable schedules made that difficult: She would only know her shifts a few days beforehand, which sometimes didn’t leave her enough time to hit the books.
"I would study from midnight until 5, 6 a.m., sleep for two or three hours, and then go to the exam,” says Flores, 21, who attends San Francisco State. This year, she expects that to change. "If I know that I have a shift scheduled, I’ll just study another day,” Flores says.
Also, the law came with some funding for community organizations to make employees aware of what workers are entitled to. That has ancillary effects — like getting people interested in joining a union, which can be better equipped to make sure companies are following the rules.
“It just creates an opportunity to talk to more workers about their rights under the law, and that leads to conversations about other issues in the workplace,” says Gordon Mar, of Jobs with Justice. “And that could lead to getting organized.”
Source: Washington Post
The fight to make bad jobs better
As of November 26, 2017, fast food companies in New York are required to post worker schedules 14 days in advance. If...
As of November 26, 2017, fast food companies in New York are required to post worker schedules 14 days in advance. If they change the schedule within that window, they will pay an extra fee to the workers who are affected. And before they hire more people, they must offer the available hours to their existing part-time workers.
Read the full article here.
Did two women in an elevator just change everything?
Jeff Flake loves decorum, but it doesn't look like it was decorous behavior that moved him to reconsider a vote that...
Jeff Flake loves decorum, but it doesn't look like it was decorous behavior that moved him to reconsider a vote that could change the country's future. Was it two women in an elevator, yelling at him?
Read the full article here.
Fed’s Kashkari to Spend Day in Life of Struggling Black Family
Neel Kashkari tried living on streets for a week during his failed run for California governor in 2014. Now, the...
Neel Kashkari tried living on streets for a week during his failed run for California governor in 2014. Now, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis will spend a day in the life of a black family barely making ends meet.
“Walking a day in somebody else’s shoes is actually -- it makes the anecdotes that much more real,” Kashkari, 43, told reporters Wednesday in Minneapolis after a meeting with the local community to discuss race and economic inequality. “It influences how I think about the problems we face.”
Kashkari, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive who went on to oversee the U.S. government’s $700 billion financial rescue program, took the helm of the Minneapolis Fed in January.
National poverty levels among blacks stand at 26 percent, more than double those for whites. Fed Chair Janet Yellen has discussed inequality and the fact that minorities have higher unemployment than whites in speeches and testimony to Congress.
Outrage has mounted in the U.S. over a recent spate of fatal shootings of black men by police, some of which were filmed and broadcast over social media, worsening racial tensions in many communities.
On Wednesday, Kashkari, whose parents emigrated to the U.S. from India, heard Rosheeda Credit describe how she and her boyfriend worked three jobs between them to support their family. She then invited him to find out himself what it was like by spending the day with her.
Kashkari said he’d be “happy to do it.”
The Fed has also been under fire from Democrats, including presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, for a lack of diversity on the boards of directors on the 12 regional Fed banks. Kashkari said the central bank had a lot of work to do to improve diversity and was committed to making that happen.
By ALISTER BULL & JEANNA SMIALEK
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Activists at Jackson Hole See Recovery on Wall Street, ‘Not My Street’
The Wall Street Journal - August 22, 2014, by Pedro Nicolaci Da Costa - A group of activists has descended on the...
The Wall Street Journal - August 22, 2014, by Pedro Nicolaci Da Costa - A group of activists has descended on the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank’s annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo., to tell central bank officials that any move to raise interest rates soon could wreak havoc on the lives of Americans still struggling with a weak economic recovery.
U.S. unemployment has fallen fairly rapidly in recent months, to 6.2% in July, down from its post-recession peak of 10%. However, the activists said those numbers mask much deeper troubles in the country’s poorer neighborhoods. The unemployment rate for African-Americans, for instance, was 11.1% in July.
Reggie Rounds, 57 years old, came to the conference from Ferguson, Mo., the site of recent violent protests following the killing of an unarmed teenager by a police officer. During a brief conversation here with Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer, Mr. Rounds, who is unemployed and says he hasn’t had regular work for years, urged the central bank to keep poor Americans on their minds as they make policy decisions.
“I deal with people who have educated themselves. These people, sir, are inundated with student loans. They’re making just not livable wages or not wages at all,” Mr. Rounds told Mr. Fischer. “We’re desperately needing a stimulant into this economy, and job creation, to get us going.”
Mr. Fischer responded: “That’s what the Fed has been trying to do and will continue to try to do.”
The Fed has kept interest rates near zero since December 2008 and bought more than $3 trillion in government and mortgage bonds to keep long-term rates low, spur investment and boost hiring.
However, recent improvements in the job market and a pickup in inflation have revived debate about when the central bank should begin lifting interest rates from rock-bottom lows. In her speech here Friday, Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen said if the labor market keeps improving faster than the Fed forecasts the central bank could raise rates sooner than expected. Many investors anticipate the first move in the summer of next year, a perception some top Fed officials have encouraged.
Representatives of the Center for Popular Democracy, a left-leaning national nonprofit organization, said they organized the activists’ trip to Jackson Hole. The participants argued that near-term rate increases could have a deep negative impact on the most vulnerable sectors of the population.
Reuben Eckels, 51, a reverend from Wichita, Kan., said he had come to the conference to tell policy makers “how raising interest rates would affect the community in which I serve.” He and other activists played down the notion of a “skills gap” where workers might not have the qualifications for the jobs available.
“We have young people who are college students in our church who have a 4.0 [grade average], Dean’s list, they can’t find jobs,” he said. “So this is not about just raising the rates so we can offset an imbalance for those elderly who are trying to save their portfolio. This is about people on the street, everyday people … who are just trying to live a good quality of life.”
Shemethia Butler, 34, is one such individual. Hailing from Washington, D.C. the mother of two says she is dealing with extreme stress because the wages she earns at McDonald’s aren’t enough to cover her rent, much less basic expenses like food, electricity and transportation.
“I have no vehicle. My housing situation is stressful. I’m about to lose my apartment. I’m struggling really hard,” she said. “Things may be fine on Wall Street, but they’re not fine on my street.”
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