CPD IN THE NEWS

New York Times - November 14, 2014, by Binyamin Appelbaum - Jean Andre traveled from Queens to the Federal Reserve Board’s stately headquarters here on Friday to tell the people who make monetary policy that he needs their help. He cannot find regular work on film and photo shoots. The jobs he does find pay less.

The Fed’s chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen, agreed to meet with about 30 workers and activists, including Mr. Andre, in a gesture of concern for the plight of Americans searching for work and struggling to make a living.

For one hour on Friday, the workers sat in the Fed’s ornate conference room and told their stories to Ms. Yellen and other Fed officials, including three other members of the Fed’s board of governors — Stanley Fischer, the vice chairman; Lael Brainard; and Jerome H. Powell — who listened and asked questions.

“The Federal Reserve is too important of an institution to be insulated from the voices and perspectives of working families,” said Ady Barkan, a lawyer with the Center for Popular Democracy, an advocacy group based in Brooklyn that orchestrated the meeting. “We think that the Fed needs to listen more and be more responsive, and we’re very grateful for this first opportunity.”

The meeting was closed to the media. The workers described what they said, and the Fed declined to comment, citing a policy of silence about private meetings.

Mr. Barkan’s group is campaigning for the Fed to continue its stimulus campaign, citing the high level of unemployment, particularly in minority communities, and the slow pace of wage growth as evidence the economy still needs help. The group argued the Fed could help to drive up wages by keeping interest rates low.

Mr. Andre, 48, said two jobs were canceled this week. And instead of $400 a day for a print shoot, he said he now made $250 or $300.

“They tell me if I don’t take the job there’s lots of other people willing to work,” he said. “So what can I do? I have a family. I have to take it.”

Josh Bivens, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group, said monetary policy would be “the single most important determinant of wage growth,” and that he was glad to see workers recognize the Fed’s importance.

A conservative group, American Principles in Action, criticized the meeting as “highly political” and inappropriate. It said it would seek a similar meeting to share its view that the Fed’s stimulus campaign is damaging the economy.

The labor and community groups at the meeting wore green T-shirts that said “What Recovery?” on the front, with a chart illustrating meager wage gains on the back. They are also pressing Ms. Yellen to change the way the Fed chooses the presidents of its regional banks.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas said Thursday that its president, Richard W. Fisher, would step down March 19. Charles I. Plosser, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, plans to retire at the beginning of March.

The Philadelphia Fed said shortly before the meeting on Friday that it had created an email address for inquiries about its presidential search process. It described the account, which will be maintained by the company conducting the search, Korn Ferry, as part of its commitment to conduct a “broad search.”

“I expect the same thing from Dallas,” said Connie Paredes, 42, who traveled to the meeting as a representative of the Texas Organizing Project, speaking at a rally outside the Fed before the group went inside. “We expect to be included in the process.”

Organizers from Dallas and Philadelphia said they would press for similar meetings with the presidents and board of the local Fed banks.

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Chicagoist - May 28, 2014, by Aaron Cynic - Supporters of raising the minimum wage introduced an ordinance at a City Council meeting today that calls for an increase to $15 an hour. The proposal, backed by several Aldermen including John Arena, Joe Moreno and Roderick Sawyer, comes on the heels of a report released that shows a raise in the wage would benefit both workers and the City’s economy.

According to the plan, companies making more than $50 million a year would be required to first raise their minimum wage to $12.50 an hour within 90 days and then to $15 within a year. Smaller businesses would have to raise their wages at a more graduated rate, with a total of four years to get to $15. From there, the minimum wage in Chicago would rise with the rate of inflation.

“Study after study demonstrates that when you put money into the pockets of consumers, they spend it," Alderman Ricardo Munoz, who also backs the measure, told Reuters. "They don't hoard it in their mattresses.”

The recent report from the Center for Popular Democracy says a minimum wage increase would yield workers about $1.1 billion collectively, with an average annual income increase of $2,620 per individual. This would generate $74 million in personal income taxes to the state and yield $616 million in new economic activity.

At a press conference at City Hall, Tanika Smith, a fast food worker, said her current pay of $8.75 an hour, just 50 cents more than the minimum wage in Illinois, simply isn’t enough. “My car note is $500 a month, my rent is about $500, food is going up, lights are going up,” said Smith.

Raising the minimum wage is becoming a key issue with politicians statewide. Last week, Mayor Rahm Emanuel gave a panel of business, labor and civic leaders 45 days to draft a plan to raise the wage in Chicago. Gov. Pat Quinn has championed raising the state wage to $10.65 an hour, and Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan is pushing for a referendum on the November ballot to ask voters if the wage should be raised to $10 an hour.

Both the Illinois Chamber of Commerce and Illinois Retail Merchant’s Association oppose an increase to the minimum wage. “We think it puts us at a competitive disadvantage,” Chamber CEO Theresa Mintle told Reuters. The Retailers Association has said that raising the wage would force businesses to cut both jobs and hours.

Ald. Moreno, however, disagrees.

“It’s gonna hurt the people at the top possibly. It’s not gonna hurt business. It never has. Raising the minimum wage in the United States has never, ever hurt the broader economy...Our economy has been splintered with those at the top having way more. The middle class is shrinking. We want the middle class to grow.”

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Times Union - August 10, 2014, by  Casey Seiler - Between its draft and final versions, a report by SUNY's Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government on New York's controversial Scaffold Law incorporated changes that tended to increase its estimates of the law's cost and impact.

Some of the changes echoed suggestions made to researchers by the leader of an anti-Scaffold Law organization that paid $82,000 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 changes reflect nothing more than their own good-faith efforts to clarify the analysis.

The 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. 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 Rockefeller Institute report was funded by the Lawsuit Reform Alliance, a leading opponent of the law, through its research arm, the New York Civil Justice Institute. The study, made public in February, drew initial controversy for a statistical analysis that concluded construction injuries in Illinois dropped after the state repealed its version of the Scaffold Law in 1995. That finding was highlighted by the law's opponents, and harshly criticized by labor groups such as the Center for Popular Democracy.

The director of the Albany-based Rockefeller Institute, Thomas Gais, subsequently backed away from that chapter, citing what he described as flaws in the Illinois analysis — conducted by a Cornell University researcher — and the fact that the report was released to its funders before a final round of vetting had taken place.

After that dispute came to light in April, advocates on both sides filed Freedom of Information Law requests to find out if pressure had been placed on the institute, either during its research or after the report's release.

Documents produced by the Rockefeller Institute in response to the Center for Popular Democracy's FOIL included email correspondence between researchers and Tom Stebbins, the leader of the Lawsuit Reform Alliance. The exchanges, described last month by the Times Union, included a July 2013 email containing two pages of Stebbins' suggested edits offered in response to a draft version of the report. While many of his suggested changes were merely typographical, others went to the substance of the report.

The institute initially refused to release the draft report, but produced it last week on the advice of SUNY's FOIL officer. Side-by-side comparisons of the two reports show that in several instances changes were made that addressed issues raised by Stebbins.

The contract between the institute and the LRA required the researchers to communicate regularly with their funders as the report progressed. In an interview last week, Stebbins said his suggestions were nothing more than an effort "to get the complete picture" of the costs of Scaffold Law.

The second section of the report, prepared by lead researcher Michael Hattery, attempted to assess the public sector costs and impacts imposed by Scaffold Law, including the annual average price of Scaffold Law-related injury awards for public projects. In the draft, researchers found that sum by taking total spending on state and local capital projects (not including public authorities) and applying the average percentage that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority reported spending for labor law injury award costs. (Because the MTA uses what's essentially an in-house insurance entity, it offered the researchers rich data on insurance costs, claim awards and construction value.)

In the draft version of the report, the formula estimates the cost of gravity-related claims costs by using half of the MTA's fraction (0.3 percent of total construction value) to estimate awards in urban areas and a quarter of the MTA average (0.15 percent) for non-urban awards. Using those multipliers, the average cost added up to $28.3 million for 2007-2011.

"Why do you use half of the MTA average .3%," Stebbins asked the researchers in his notes on the draft. He added that it seemed "very inconsistent" with the industry's estimate that Scaffold Law adds at least 4 percent to the cost of any public construction project.

"How can we reconcile?" he wrote.

Stebbins also pointed the authors to data available from the New York City School Construction Authority, which has in recent years buckled under escalating insurance costs for its projects.

The $28.3 million figure, he wrote, "does not include additional insurance costs, which is likely the driver of the 4% estimate. Any thoughts on getting to that number? ... Perhaps we could have an MTA estimate for payouts and an SCA estimate for insurance. That may help reconcile the two figures."

The final report uses calculations that doubled the potential claims costs.

A corrected version of the draft's calculation ($30.2 million) is offered as a "lower bound" for average annual injury awards, but the report provides a new "upper bound" of $60.5 million obtained by employing the full MTA average (0.6 percent) for urban projects and half of that fraction (0.3 percent) for non-urban work.

In a response to the Times Union's emailed questions last week, Hattery said that the injury award cost figure was always intended as "a very rough estimate" due to a lack of specific data.

"After reflection — after the first draft — we chose to use a range rather than a single point estimate," he said. "This is often done so that users and readers of the report do not overvalue the 'precision' of a single number when it is based on a significant set of assumptions."

The same chapter of the draft includes a two-page case study on the construction of the Lake Champlain Bridge, in which those interviewed — including the chief engineers on the New York and Vermont sides of the project, Vermont's attorney general, and the contractor's project engineer and risk control manager — said Scaffold Law had only marginal impact on the structure's price tag.

In his edits, Stebbins recommended scrapping the case study: "As discussed, suggest we remove this section unless we can get someone to talk."

"I felt that no one they interviewed knew what Scaffold Law was and how it affected the cost of construction," Stebbins said last week. " ... We were not able to get people who understood what the costs were."

The final report jettisoned the Champlain Bridge analysis.

Hattery said the case study was dropped because it failed to provide a contrast between insurance costs in the two states. Because New York was the principle partner in the bridge project, he said, "there was no contrast to compare in the execution of the project ... nor were there any fall-from-height claims to review and describe, to our knowledge."

In its place, a new case study was added that examined Scaffold Law's impacts on the School Construction Authority, and described the $1.1 million settlement of an accident claim that ended up costing half of the construction value of the project where the injury occurred.

Hattery said the SCA analysis was included because of the researchers' desire to offer "at least one specific Scaffold case in a higher-density urban environment. ... The case was completed later, in part, because it required a longer time frame for access to personnel, data, etc."

Stebbins said it would have been irresponsible for researchers to not have addressed the SCA in the analysis.

The final report was the centerpiece of February's annual Scaffold Law reform lobby day at the Capitol. The Lawsuit Reform Alliance touted its release with a news statement: "With the study in hand," it concluded, "Scaffold Law reform advocates look for positive traction in the legislature this year."

Instead, the session ended with no action taken on Scaffold Law.

Josie Duffy of the Center for Popular Democracy called on the Rockefeller Institute to release all the drafts of the disputed report.

"The public deserves a full accounting of SUNY's role in helping business groups attack worker safety laws," she said.

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"Do you know what it’s like working long, erratic hours without knowing day-to-day what your schedule would be? Some of us do. If we haven’t worked in low-wage retail or the service sector, we’re lucky that usually our hard work paid off, and we could advance in our careers.

For low-wage retail and service workers at large corporations, there’s no moving forward. When someone has an “I’ll do anything it takes” attitude, they are not rewarded for their labor, their adaptability or their commitment. Instead, they are often met with the chaos of unpredictable hours.

When people don’t have stable full-time or even part-time hours, they can’t budget or schedule basic things like child care, doctor visits, classes, family time or self care.

Take Cinthia, who works for DB Shoes, one of Emeryville’s numerous corporate retail chains. She works hard to take care of her family, but struggles with not having reliable hours. She juggles appointments for her younger brother, classes and work. When we met her, we asked how much sleep she got the previous night. She said, “Four hours.”

A recent survey conducted by the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy and the Center for Popular Democracy found that a staggering 80 percent of retail workers have fluctuating hours from week to week; 68 percent only receive part-time hours; and more than half experience “clopening” shifts — back-to-back closing then opening a few hours later.

Two out of 3 workers surveyed want more hours but can’t get them. Fluctuating hours are considered undesirable by many workers. There are thousands of working people like Cinthia who are run ragged with erratic work schedules that not only have harmful effects on them personally, but on their families and our communities.

Our cities are built on everyone coming together to create a thriving place where people can live, work and play. But when people are not earning enough and have erratic schedules, they don’t have time to invest in our community or local businesses.

San Francisco passed a fair workweek policy, putting the Bay Area at the fair workweek movement’s forefront. Emeryville and San Jose are also considering similar policies to begin to move the entire region toward a more sustainable work model and ensure that people have both higher wages and regular, predictable hours they can count on.

Some of us take our routines for granted. We get up, rush to get everyone out the door, work a single job, come home, eat, go to bed. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. But for too many working people, that kind of stability is a dream. It shouldn’t be — and we can do something about it.

Now that we’ve won a $15 minimum wage across California, we know we need to finish the job and ensure working people have hours they can count on. A regional fair workweek provides hardworking people with the opportunity to work with stable schedules so they can pay the bills, live healthier lives, and contribute more to our communities."

By Dianne Martinez and Ruth Atkin

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