CPD IN THE NEWS

Proponents of hiking the state’s minimum wage have already collected more than $1.4 million to put the issue on the November ballot and convince voters to support it.

But there’s no word on how much the Arizona Restaurant Association has spent so far trying to keep Proposition 206 from ever getting to voters.

New campaign finance reports due Friday show donations of $1,357,509 to Arizonans for Fair Wages and Health Families, with another $100,000 on loan from campaign consultant Bill Scheel. Most of those dollars — about $900,000 — were spent hiring paid circulators to put the issue on the ballot.

But the secretary of state’s office said Friday it has yet to get a spending report from foes. In fact, spokesman Matt Roberts said foes have not even filed to form a campaign committee, a legal prerequisite for spending any money for or against ballot measures.

There clearly has been some spending.

The restaurant association hired attorneys and filed suit on July 14 in a legal bid, unsuccessful to date, to have the measure removed from the November ballot. And the report due Friday is supposed to cover all expenses through Aug. 18.

Neither Steve Chucri, president of the restaurant group, nor Chiane Hewer, its spokeswoman, returned repeated calls seeking comment.

Roberts said his office has no legal opinion on whether the money spent in court over ballot measures has to be reported. But the legal expenses incurred by initiative supporters are listed, with their report saying the group paid $70,000 to the Torres Law Group to defend them in the lawsuit brought by the restaurant association.

Proposition 206, if approved in November, would immediately hike the state minimum wage from $8.05 an hour now to $10. It would hit $12 an hour by 2020, with future increases linked to inflation.

It also would require companies to provide five days of paid sick leave a year; small employers would have to offer three days.

There is one thing missing, however, from the report by the pro-206 group.

The report shows $998,684 of the donations coming from Living United for Change in Arizona.

But Tomas Robles, former director of LUCHA who is now chairing the campaign, said some of those dollars came from elsewhere. He said the organization has been the beneficiary of funds from groups like the Center for Popular Democracy and the United Food and Commercial Workers union.

Robles said, though, that the way Arizona law has been amended by the Republican-controlled legislature does not require detailing the specific donors or the amounts they gave.

While any spending by the restaurant association to date is unknown, the campaign is likely to be overshadowed, at least financially, by the fight over Proposition 205.

That measure would legalize the recreational use of marijuana by all adults; current law limits use of the drug to those who have certain medical conditions, a doctor’s recommendation and a state-issued ID card.

So far the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol has amassed more than $3 million in donations.

Of that, $778,950 comes from the Marijuana Policy Project, the national group that funded the successful 2010 campaign for medical marijuana. A separate Marijuana Policy Project Foundation kicked in another $236,572.

Virtually all of the other five- and six-figure donations come from existing medical marijuana dispensaries. Proposition 205 would give them first crack at getting a license for one of the fewer than 150 retail outlets that would be allowed until 2021.

So far the campaign has spent nearly $2.6 million.

The opposition Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy reported collected $950,011 but has spent less than $294,000.

The Arizona Chamber of Commerce is the largest single source of funds for the anti-205 campaign, so far putting in $114,000.

There’s also a $100,000 donation from T. Sanford Denny. He’s the chairman of United National Corp., which Bloomberg says is a privately owned holding company for First Premier Bank.

Another $100,000 was chipped in by Randy Kendrick, wife of Arizona Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick.

The new reports also show that a branch of the Service Employees International Union spent $2.1 million in its ill-fated attempt to put a measure on the ballot to cap the compensation of non-medical hospital executives at $450,000 a year. Proponents gave up after a lawsuit was filed contending that many of the people who circulated petitions had not complied with state law, voiding any of the signatures they collected.

By: Howard Fischer

Source

Cities for Citizenship is a national initiative supported by advocacy groups Center for Popular Democracy and the National Partnership for New Americans, with Citi Community Development as founding corporate sponsor. Fourteen cities were awarded challenge grants of either $25,000 or $40,000 a year over two years after 66 cities submitted proposals.

Read the full article here.

Many of us think that any employment, even part time, provides a measure of security. This is not the case for the millions of low-wage workers who are subject to unstable work schedules. In an effort to minimize labor costs (and with an egregious fixation with statistical models), businesses are hiring part time and using scheduling software that attempts to dynamically match labor hours with demand. This practice, known as ‘just-in-time’ work scheduling, shifts business risk to some of the most vulnerable workers and has serious consequences for families.

Store managers say that they prefer to hire workers with open availability, so employment is essentially contingent on open availability with no minimum guarantee of hours. Applicants are compelled to conceal outside commitments, including caregiver duties and their own medical needs. Workers who desperately need more hours are unable take a second job, since anything less than full availability is responded to punitively with reduced shifts. Workers are sometimes sent home early or without clocking in at all.

Unpredictable schedules means workers are unable to improve their future earnings through school or training. Over the long term, career trajectories are negatively affected because part-time workers receive lower hourly wages, less training, and fewer opportunities for job promotion. This structural barrier to economic mobility has the potential to create a permanent underclass of worker.

Volatile work schedules also mean volatile incomes, and added uncertainty in daily life. “The amount of hours and days I work changes on a weekly basis so I never know how much my check will be,” a worker testifying for the Fair Workweek Initiative explains. “That means I don’t know how much I can contribute to rent and bills, how much food I can buy for my daughter, or whether I can even afford to do laundry that week.” 

Last fall, The Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) presented an audio conference to discuss updates to the social safety net to better accommodate volatile work schedules. During the conference, Jessica Webster from the Legal Services Advocacy Project in Minnesota related a story about a mother of one-year-old twins who was working as a security guard while receiving TANF. An unexpected drop in work hours caused interruption in her subsidized childcare, resulting in job loss and homelessness.

Called the “next new human right” by American Prospect, the issue of fair work schedules has gained a lot of traction over the past year. In 2014, a federal bill to address abusive scheduling practices died in committee and was reintroduced by Senator Warren in 2015 with substantially more sponsors. Advocates are not waiting for action from Capitol Hill, however. In 2014, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed the Retail Workers Bill of Rights, the first sweeping reforms addressing on-demand scheduling and part-time work in the country. In 2015, several jurisdictions introduced legislation designed specifically to address fair work scheduling.

The Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) maintains a repository for information pertaining to unstable work schedules and the University of Chicago hosts the Employment Instability, Family Wellbeing, and Social Policy Network (EINet), a group of academics and policymakers who are working to address these issues. The NationalWomen’s Law Center has presented testimony to congress and compiled fact sheets that spell out legal provisions as well as the effects on female-headed households.

Perhaps as a result of increased media coverage, some retailers announced an end to on-call shifts, with mixed results. In December, Kronos, one of the largest software developers in the work scheduling space, announced a partnership with the Center for Popular Democracy to build in features that take worker preference into account. Even more encouraging, some business leaders and academics are questioning whether minimizing labor costs is actually beneficial to the bottom line. Researchers at the Center for WorkLife Law assert that it is possible to improve scheduling efficiency, while considering the needs of workers.

What Community Groups Can Do While the fight for a fair work week continues, it is likely that many constituents of community organizations are facing this kind of uncertainty with both schedule and income. This may impede the work of community groups in many ways, from making it more complicated to determine appropriate affordable rent based on income to making it harder for residents to regularly show up for trainings, appointments, or organizing meetings.

Some of CLASP’s recommendations for adapting social service agencies to this new work environment can apply to community organizations as well. They include:

1. Offering blocks of call-in time, rather than specific appointments.

2. Using sliding fee schedules so that a temporary change in income doesn’t disqualify a family for services.

3. Estimating incomes over a longer time horizon or projecting future income with variability in mind.

4. Lengthening re-qualification periods for services.

5. Developing education and job-search tools that can be accessed intermittently online rather than holding workshops

6. Offering childcare with extended hours and vouchers that permit hours to be purchased in blocks of time that can vary from week to week.

7. Providing information on off-hours public transit options and income-based transportation fees, like those offered by the city of Seattle. Sincepoverty is now growing fastest in the suburbs, those living outside of urban centers have fewer transportation options, especially for non-standard shifts. Logistics can quickly get out of hand for those who commute to multiple part-time jobs or need pick up children from day care at a specific time.

Community-based organizations might also consider taking on an advocacy role with public agencies. When it comes to public benefits, just-in-time scheduling creates an irony that borders on the absurd: while unstable work hours compel many families to rely on public benefits, this same volatility often prevents access to those benefits. A small, temporary increase in income or decrease in work hours can trigger automatic sanctions or program disqualification.

Though under federal funding, accommodations would be allowed under the sorts of circumstances just-in-time scheduling creates, Webster noted that state agencies often fail to exercise this discretion, and clients and administrators alike are often not aware it is possible. State and local agencies can and should realign their processes to address this. But there is also an opportunity for those outside of public agencies to make a difference by organizing to inform recipients of their benefits rights. These efforts would save money by reducing “churn” (i.e., people kicked off benefits only to be put back on them again), improve outcomes for recipients, and remove disincentives to work. CLASP notes that these ideas have broad political support, which could be encouraging news for enterprising community practitioners who would like to develop a role in this area.

Fundamentally, we need to advance legal and cultural recognition that, especially for those who are resource-constrained, time is tremendously valuable, and that human needs are not nearly as scalable as mathematical models imply.

Source: Rooflines

NEW YORK—A group of activists lobbying the Federal Reserve to hold off on raising interest rates is pressing its campaign amid signs from the central bank that it is moving closer to lifting borrowing costs.

Members of the Fed Up Coalition, a left-leaning organization affiliated with the Center for Popular Democracy and connected with labor unions and community groups, met with Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen and other central bank governors late last year.

They recently have met with the leaders of the Boston, Kansas City and San Francisco Fed banks, and are scheduled to meet next with Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockharton Aug. 12 and with New York Fed President William Dudley on Aug. 14.

Most Fed officials, including Ms. Yellen, have indicated they expect to start raising short-term interest rates this year if the economy keeps improving. They have held their benchmark rate near zero since December 2008 to bolster the economy.

The activists say they want the Fed to hold off a bit longer to ensure the expansion benefits all Americans, not just the wealthiest.

They also want the Fed to become more open about its actions and how it selects the presidents of the 12 regional reserve banks.

And they want the Fed to engage with banks to promote affordable housing.

“Over the last few weeks we’ve had a lot of success engaging with Fed officials,” said Ady Barkan, who leads the Center for Popular Democracy Fed campaign. His group is “seeing that [Fed officials] are really being responsive” to the case they are making, he said.

Mr. Barkan said a recent meeting with St. Louis Fed President James Bullard was particularly fruitful. Mr. Bullard said in an interview with the Journal Friday the Fed has a balancing act when it comes to setting interest rate policy.

He favors raising interest rates this year and says the central bank’s September meeting is likely a good time to start.

“I think I have the better policy for the type of people they want to help,” Mr. Bullard said. “If you go for too much in monetary policy you can get some sort of financial bubbles and imbalances that fall apart and cause a recession,” and modest rate rises soon will help reduce those risks.

The activist group also is calling for greater representation on regional banks’ boards of directors for noncorporate interests. By law, the regional Fed directors are drawn from a mix of financial industry professionals, community and business leaders. Each board oversees individual reserve bank operations, and the directors from outside the financial sector manage the selection of new reserve bank presidents.

Mr. Barkan said Fed boards are dominated by the perspectives of leaders from large institutions. While he welcomes union and nonprofit representation on the boards, Mr. Barkan said the diversity should extend further and include a more ground-level perspective on how the economy is functioning.

Jean-Andre Sassine, age 48, of New York City, plans to attend the group’s meeting with Mr. Dudley. Mr. Sassine, who said he works on television and advertising productions, became interested in the Fed when his family ran into difficulties during the recession. He said that led him to ask questions about the role the central bank was playing to help everyday people.

When he went with the group to the meeting with Ms. Yellen, Mr. Sassine said he walked away with “the sense they aren’t used to dealing with people. It seems like they just get reports” and work off that data, and little else, to make their decisions, Mr. Sassine said.

“We are supposed to have input and recognition and we don’t have it,” Mr. Sassine said. “It can’t all be corporate heads and bankers…We’ve got to have real people who buy groceries” on the Fed’s various advisory boards, he said.

The Fed has tried to broaden its public outreach in recent years. The central bank this year has been recruiting people to serve on a new Community Advisory Council, which will meet twice a year with Washington-based Fed governors. Ms. Yellen last year visited a job-training program in Chicago and a nonprofit in Chelsea, Mass., that helps unemployed people find work.

Mr. Dudley has conducted a number of public tours of the New York Fed’s district, in which he has met with business leaders, academics, community groups and others. In a Wall Street Journal interview in March 2014 he explained he had been using the tours to make the Fed seem less abstract. And he also said the visits had in particular deepened his understanding of the housing crisis and sharpened his response to those troubles.

Staff at the regional Fed banks who have met with the activists say their meetings are part of regular efforts to engage with their communities, and can offer valuable insight into the state of the economy.

In a statement, the Atlanta Fed said it regularly meets with community based interest groups “through its various outreach programs including community and economic development, economic education, and supervision and regulation.”

Source: The Wall Street Journal