Low-wage workers pick their next battleground
Just four years ago, fast food workers in New York City walked off the job, launching the first strike to ever hit the...
Just four years ago, fast food workers in New York City walked off the job, launching the first strike to ever hit the industry and a movement that has had rapid success. Calling for a $15 minimum wage and the right to form a union, the Fight for 15 started staging strikes and protests in a growing number of cities — the last day of action reached 320 — that drew in workers beyond fast food, including adjunct professors, childcare providers, and retail workers.
That fight is by no means over, but it has led to surprising victories. Today, two states have passed increases to bring their minimum wages to $15 an hour, as have a number of major cities.
Now workers are pushing forward on a new demand: the right to consistent and predictable schedules.
In many ways, advocates see this as a natural extension of the Fight for 15. After all, higher hourly pay means little if you never know you’ll have enough hours to make ends meet or if a last-minute change disrupts your plans for childcare or transportation.
“Workers who have experienced their wage increase and then see their hours cut the next week more than anything know that their paycheck is their wages times hours,” pointed out Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy.
Erratic and unpredictable scheduling has become a more and more common problem. “The erosion of unions, compounded by the accelerated pace of change and the nature of work, has only increased the need for updating our standards around hours,” she said.
At least 17 percent of all workers have irregular schedules, including changing or on-call shifts or working two shifts in one day. Over 40 percent of workers don’t find their schedules out until a week in advance, while 40 percent say their hours vary week to week. It’s especially prevalent in service sector jobs; huge numbers of retail workers in New York City and food service workers in Washington say they don’t get enough notice of their hours each week.
“The fight for just hours is definitely the next movement for people trying to achieve security for their families.”
“The fight for just hours is definitely the next movement for people trying to achieve security for their families,” Gleason added. “New energy has been generated with the Fight for 15, and as policymakers have raised the minimum wage and passed paid sick days across the country, they’re turning their attention to the crisis around hours finally.”
The movement has already notched victories. In 2014, San Francisco became the first city to pass legislation regulating schedules, enacting a law that requires retail chains to give employees two weeks notice of their schedules, pay them if shifts change at the last minute, give current workers the opportunity to take on more hours before new hires are brought in, and to treat part-time workers similarly as full-time ones.
Then on Monday evening, the Seattle city council voted unanimously to pass a law that looks very similar. It will require large employers in retail and food service to give employees two weeks notice of schedules, extra pay for last-minute changes, and input into what their schedules will look like. It will also get rid of “clopenings,” or when employees work a closing shift one day only to come in early the next morning to open.
Seattle workers had already helped secure a $15 minimum wage increase in 2014. And it was after that victory that the conversation around scheduling began.
“It really became apparent during the 15 campaign that workers not only needed a higher minimum wage, but they needed more stable schedules,” said Sejal Parikh, executive director of Working Washington. After that campaign resulted in a victory, “workers started talking about what the next campaign would be: Making sure the minimum wage is enforced, and figuring out how to get to more secure schedules in the city.”
It’s “the natural other half of the 15 dollar campaign,” she added.
It’s “the natural other half of the 15 dollar campaign.”
That effort also coincided with one targeted at Starbucks. In the summer of 2014, shortly after a New York Times exposé on the company’s scheduling practices, Starbucks announced that it would make changes such as ending clopenings and posting schedules three weeks out.
But a year ago this month, Starbucks baristas in Seattle launched a campaign accusing the company of unevenly implementing these practices and still allowing workers’ schedules to be erratic.
Those two groups of workers got together and began talking to the city council late last year, and Parikh said they got a warm reception. The issue “really resonated with people,” she said. “Many of us have worked in retail or fast food or coffee and could recall times when we didn’t know what our schedule would be.” Workers were deeply involved in crafting the legislation, too: it was built around answers to surveys sent out to fast food employees and baristas asking them about their priorities.
It helped to be able to work with those in San Francisco who worked on the passage of the bill there and have been implementing it since. “Because San Francisco went first, we have a piece of policy where we’ve learned a lot of lessons,” she said.
“It’s really catching on,” she added. “I think it’s going to be one of the next pieces of labor policy across the country.”
It’s already reached the other coast. Seattle’s victory came just a week after New York City said it would start working on being the next. Last Thursday, Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) announced that he, along with legislators and advocates, would begin crafting legislation aimed at improving scheduling for fast food workers. While the details will be hashed out in the months to come, he focused on two weeks advance notice, compensation for last-minute changes, and cracking down on clopenings.
“It’s really catching on.”
“It’s time for us to use the power of city government to make sure that people are treated decently,” he said at the press conference announcing the new effort.
New York City, home to the first fast food strike, now has a $15 minimum wage thanks to the state increase. “If [workers are] making 15 an hour, it doesn’t really matter if they don’t know when they’re actually making that money,” said Freddi Goldstein, deputy press secretary for the mayor. Scheduling “just felt like a natural next step.”
And as Seattle looked to San Francisco for guidance, New York will work with people in those two cities to see what worked and what didn’t.
The city is only looking at the fast food industry so far because, Goldstein said, it’s a workforce that is rarely unionized and “highly abused.” But it’s possible the focus could expand beyond that industry in the future, and as the effort to craft the legislation unfolds new planks could also be added. “I wouldn’t say we haven’t decided to do or not do anything at this point,” she said.
The scheduling movement hasn’t met with a totally unbroken string of successes: On Tuesday the D.C. city council voted to table a bill that would have addressed scheduling, killing it for the current session. Councilmember Elissa Silverman vowed to introduce a new version of the bill in the next one.
But the idea is starting to spread. It’s cropped up in Minneapolis, MN and Emeryville, CA. A scheduling bill has also been introduced in Congress, although it hasn’t advanced. “We’re already seeing policymakers step up across the country,” the Center for Popular Democracy’s Gleason said.
“The movement for the Fair Labor Standards Act was about wages and the 40-hour workweek,” she added. “It’s only natural that we’re seeing the demand for just wages and hours back again.”
By Bryce Covert
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Lingo still a barrier to relief
Times Union – August 7, 2013, by Jimmy Vielkind - Immigrant advocacy groups say it remains difficult to get access to...
Times Union – August 7, 2013, by Jimmy Vielkind - Immigrant advocacy groups say it remains difficult to get access to government services in languages other than English — nearly two years after Gov. Andrew Cuomo decreed that written and oral interpretation would be available the state’s six most-spoken foreign languages.
Cuomo signed an executive order that took effect last October mandating state officials to offer language assistance for speakers of Spanish, French, Italian, French Creole, Russian and Chinese. But the order’s scope was necessarily limited to state agencies, even though state-funded services like food stamps, driver’s licenses and unemployment benefits are administered by New York City or other counties.
The groups — including Make the Road New York, the Center for Popular Democracy and the Center for the Elimination of Minority Health Disparities at the University at Albany — visited government offices and surveyed people with limited English proficiency to develop a measure of compliance. In a report released earlier this week, they found that less than half the people who needed language assistance were able to receive it.
According to Nisha Agarwal, deputy director of the Center for Popular Democracy, the survey found 63 percent of citizens using state-operated facilities that are explicitly covered by the order were not successful in their quest to gain language assistance.
“The governor’s team has been very engaged on implementation, and we’re sympathetic to the challenges of getting an entire state apparatus to change,” said Agarwal. “That said, the results are by no means satisfactory, and we were quite disappointed that the state took the position that county-run agencies for state services were not within the ambit of the order. We feel it’s a pretty big gap.”
The Cuomo administration responded by saying that all covered state agencies are in compliance with this executive order
“This report paints an inaccurate picture of reality by relying on visits to county-run agencies that by law fall outside the executive order,” said Cuomo spokesman Richard Azzopardi. “Everyone should have the same access to their government, and we encourage counties to follow the state’s lead.”
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Fed Up Statement: Market Turmoil Should Remind Fed that Economy Is Too Weak to Slow It Down
Shawn Sebastian, Policy Analyst at the Center for Popular Democracy, released the following statement on behalf of the...
Shawn Sebastian, Policy Analyst at the Center for Popular Democracy, released the following statement on behalf of the Fed Up campaign:
“The Fed Up campaign has been saying for more than a year that the economy is too weak to warrant interest rate hikes. Although the stock market was performing well and Wall Street was reaping major profits, the real economy has seen stagnant wages and insufficient job growth.
“The past week’s events vindicate our argument. The economy is too weak, and the performance of the stock market is not a legitimate basis for making interest rate decisions. Just as the market inflated itself over previous months, and witnessed a “correction” recently, it will likely continue to fluctuate in the months ahead. Fed officials who pointed to an inflated stock market as a justification to raise interest rates have been proven wrong: the health of the economy should be measured by the labor market, not the stock market, and the labor market is far from recovered.
“The Fed must continue focusing on the fundamentals: building a labor market that works for all communities, and that features rising wages and good jobs for everybody who wants to work. Creating genuine full employment is the Fed’s mandate, and the past few days vindicate the message that the Fed Up campaign’s worker leaders and economists have said all along: this economy is far too weak for the Fed to intentionally slow it down.”
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The Center for Popular Democracy promotes equity, opportunity, and a dynamic democracy in partnership with innovative base-building organizations, organizing networks and alliances, and progressive unions across the country. CPD builds the strength and capacity of democratic organizations to envision and advance a pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial justice agenda.
How Can We Combat Wage Theft And Protect Immigrant Workers?
How Can We Combat Wage Theft And Protect Immigrant Workers?
Every year, millions of workers suffer from wage theft when employers or companies do not pay them what they are owed....
Every year, millions of workers suffer from wage theft when employers or companies do not pay them what they are owed. Wage theft, which costs America’s low-wage workers an estimated $50 billion each year, comes in different forms. An employer could keep customer tips instead of paying them out to workers, force employees to work off the clock without compensation, or illegally deduct the cost of uniforms or work tools from employees’ paycheck.
Read the full article here.
Aboard flight, dad battling ALS pleads with Sen. Jeff Flake to vote no on tax bill
Aboard flight, dad battling ALS pleads with Sen. Jeff Flake to vote no on tax bill
A 33-year-old father battling ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, was flying home last week after traveling to...
A 33-year-old father battling ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, was flying home last week after traveling to Washington, D.C., to protest the tax bill when he came face-to-face with one of the lawmakers he most hoped to influence.
Ady Barkan and others had spent a week trying to get lawmakers' attention and giving speeches outside their offices.
Read the full article here.
The resistance is making one last all-out push to kill the GOP health bill
The resistance is making one last all-out push to kill the GOP health bill
More than 300 health care activists, disability rights advocates, and organizers gathered on second floor of the...
More than 300 health care activists, disability rights advocates, and organizers gathered on second floor of the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Monday morning to oppose Senate Republicans’ Graham-Cassidy health care bill.
The bill would sharply reduce spending for Medicaid by billions of dollars by tying it to medical inflation, blow up Obamacare’s marketplaces, and open the door for states to curtail protections for patients with preexisting conditions.
Read the full article here.
Activists offer ideas to police charter schools
A pair of activist groups, the Alliance for Quality Education and Center for Popular Democracy, is out with a guide —...
A pair of activist groups, the Alliance for Quality Education and Center for Popular Democracy, is out with a guide — or rather suggestions — for better policing and monitoring finances of the state’s charter schools, which serve some 90,000 students, mostly in New York City.
The report states that since charters aren’t subject to all the reporting requirements required of public schools, there has been waste and abuse.
It contends the state could lose $54 million to fraud at charter schools this year, based on an accounting system used by fraud examiners that assumes 5 percent of that kind of mismanagement and tomfoolery.
To be sure, these groups are not exactly charter-friendly: AQE is funded in part by the state teachers union; the Center for Popular Democracy is also aligned with the national teachers union, AFT, among other groups.
They want a moratorium on charter expansion — which could become a high-profile issue during the next legislative session.
Here is their release and report: One note: some of these problems outlined below including the issues at Harriett Tubman Charter School occurred several years ago and under different administrations.
Today, the Center for Popular Democracy and Alliance for Quality Education released a report titled Risking Public Money: New York Charter School Fraud that reveals vulnerabilities in the state’s charter oversight system that could potentially cost New York state taxpayers as much as $54 million in charter fraud this year alone.
“Our governor and other school privatization advocates have pushed relentlessly to expand the charter industry at the expense of public school communities in New York State,” said Billy Easton, Executive Director of the Alliance for Quality Education. “But the proliferation of charters hasn’t been matched by the oversight needed to ensure that public money intended for students doesn’t instead get lost to fraud, waste and abuse.”
The report finds that state agencies have audited just a quarter of New York’s more than 250 charter schools since 2005, largely relying on them to police themselves instead. Yet in a startling 95 percent of the charters examined, auditors found mismanagement and internal control deficiencies that have occasioned $28.2 million in known fraud, waste, or mismanagement. Recognizing that the industry cannot be trusted to monitor itself for problems, the report’s authors have offered common sense interventions to remedy the problem, and have called for a moratorium on charter expansion until meaningful public oversight has been put in place.
“We can’t afford to have a system that fails to cull the fraudulent charter operators from the honest ones.” said Kyle Serrette, Education Director at the Center for Popular Democracy. “Given that New York spends over $1.5 billion on charter schools and more than 90,000 children are enrolled, a lot is at stake. We can’t afford to wait for tens or hundreds of millions more dollars to be lost before policymakers address this glaring issue.”
Here are only a few statewide examples among the dozens in the report:
IN NEW YORK CITY: Harriett Tubman Charter School issued credit cards to its executive director and its director of operation. They charge more than $75,000 in less than two years. The charges were never approved or explained.
IN LONG ISLAND: Roosevelt Children’s Academy Charter School paid four vendor a total of $521,197 for significant public work and purchase contracts without fair competition.
IN ALBANY: Albany Commuity Charter School lost between $207,000 to $2.3 million by purchasing a site for its elementary school rather than leasing it.
IN ROCHESTER: Eugenio Maria de Hostos Charter School failed to enter into a competitive bidding process for several instructional contracts. Instead the school awarded contracts to board members, relatives and other related parties.
IN BUFFALO: Oracle Charter High School entered a 15-year building lease with Oracle Building Corporation, agreeing to pay them more than $5 million at a 20 percent interest rate.
Source: Times Union
Activista colombiana de Queens confrontó a Senador Flake en ascensor sobre caso Kavanaugh
Activista colombiana de Queens confrontó a Senador Flake en ascensor sobre caso Kavanaugh
Ana María Archila, un activista colombiana residente en Queens que ha liderado muchas protestas en Nueva York, ganó...
Ana María Archila, un activista colombiana residente en Queens que ha liderado muchas protestas en Nueva York, ganó atención nacional ayer al confrontar al senador Jeff Flake en un elevador del Capitolio.
Lea el artículo completo aquí.
Claims of Racism at Zara Portray the Retail Industry at Its Worst
The retail industry is one the largest sources of new jobs in the US economy, employing 15 million Americans and...
The retail industry is one the largest sources of new jobs in the US economy, employing 15 million Americans and accounting for 1 out of every 6 private sector jobs added to the economy last year. Yet as my colleague Catherine Ruetschlin and NAACP’s Dedrick Asante-Muhammad found in a study published earlier this month, common retail practices perpetuate racial inequality, fostering occupational segregation, low pay, unstable schedules, and involuntary part-time work that disproportionately harm people of color in the retail workforce.
This week a new report casts a spotlight on employment discrimination at a particular retailer: Zara, a fairly new clothing chain in the United States which nevertheless is part of the world’s largest fashion retail company. Based on interviews of 251 Zara employees in New York City, researchers at the Center for Popular Democracy uncovered troubling pattern of concerns about racial discrimination. They find that Black employees are far more likely than other workers to be assigned work hours they find unsatisfactory and that darker skinned employees report they are least likely to be promoted. The report documents a widespread perception of managerial favoritism, with employees of color being treated more harshly and offered less leeway when requesting a sick day or coming in to work late. Darker skinned workers are disproportionately employed in lower-prestige positions in the back of the store. The company rejects the findings, asserting that it does “not tolerate discrimination of any form.”
Yet accusations of racism on the sales floor are a counterpoint to a recent lawsuit alleging discrimination within Zara’s corporate structure, including claims that senior executives at Zara regularly used racial slurs and exchanged racist emails while discriminating against a corporate attorney who was Jewish and gay. The company has also faced scrutiny forselling racially and ethnically offensive clothing and accessories.
According the new report, Zara employees have also witnessed racial profiling of customers, with Black shoppers far more likely to be targeted as potential thieves than white customers. Here too, the allegations fit into a deplorable pattern within the retail industry: last year, major New York retailers Macy’s and Barney’s entered into settlementswith the office of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to settle allegations of racial profiling and false detentions and agreeing to take concrete steps to prevent discrimination against shoppers of color.
But while lawsuits and enforcement actions can make a difference, Zara and other retailers must not wait for legal action to remedy conditions that disadvantage workers and shoppers of color. The NAACP/Demos report highlights how offering livable wages and improving employee schedules would reduce racial disparities even as low-paid employees of all races and ethnicities see benefits. And the Center for Popular Democracy report suggests that Zara allow its New York workers “to choose to represent themselves in grievances through real bargaining agents, such as labor unions, without interference.” By directly empowering employees to push for fair treatment, a union could make the most enduring change of all.
Source: Demos
Push for Immigrants to Become Citizens
Mayors of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago Launch 'Cities for Citizenship' Wall Street Journal...
Wall Street Journal, Michael Howard Saul, September 17, 2014 - The mayors of the nation's three largest cities—New York, Los Angeles and Chicago—plan to launch a new effort on Wednesday to increase citizenship among legal permanent residents, an effort officials hope will spread across the country.
The initiative, titled "Cities for Citizenship," will help the three cities expand naturalization programs and other ventures dedicated to helping immigrants secure their financial footing through counseling, legal assistance and microloans.
Citigroup, the founding corporate partner, is contributing more than $1.1 million.
The initiative comes as the number of legal immigrants becoming citizens is on the rise. Last year, naturalizations in the U.S. increased to 779,929, up nearly 3% from 2012, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration.
In the New York metro area, naturalizations have increased at the greatest pace among metropolitan areas nationwide, up roughly 37% in 2013 compared with 2011. In the Los Angeles metro area, naturalizations climbed about 12% between 2011 and 2013, while in the metro region that includes Chicago, the number of naturalizations has remained stagnant, mirroring many other places nationwide.
"Citizenship is a powerful poverty-fighting tool because it brings huge economic benefits to families and to communities," New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said. "More than that, it helps keep families together."
A report to be released Wednesday—from the Center for Popular Democracy and the National Partnership for New Americans, two nonprofit groups, and the University of Southern California—shows the economic benefit that citizenship brings to local economies.
According to the report, the increase in earnings to immigrants, who otherwise wouldn't have become citizens, is estimated to add between $1.8 and $4.1 billion over 10 years to New York's economy; between $1.6 billion and $2.8 billion in Los Angeles; and between $1 billion and $1.6 billion in Chicago.
Among the nearly nine million permanent residents nationwide who are eligible for citizenship, there are currently about 450,000 New Yorkers who are "one step away" from becoming naturalized, Mr. de Blasio said. Many haven't completed the process because of the cost, Mr. de Blasio said, but the new initiative will help them navigate the legal process and obtain financial assistance.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said his goal is to make Chicago "the most immigrant-friendly" city in the country.
Almost half of all new businesses are started by immigrants, Mr. Emanuel said. "So, you can't be pro-small business and anti-immigrant," he said. "They're inconsistent."
Bob Annibale, global director of community development at Citigroup, said statistics clearly show poverty levels are much higher among foreign-born residents than those who have become citizens.
"So, there really is a value in helping people not only to build a national identity, but with that, their financial identity," Mr. Annibale said. "And that's sort of the role where we felt we could be part of this."
As part of the initiative, the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs in New York City will issue a study on the economic impact of citizenship programs for mayors across the country in hopes of demonstrating the value of funding naturalization programs as a way to combat poverty.
"Immigrants are the backbone of our economy," Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said. "It's time we encouraged their successful integration into our social and political tapestry to continue boosting our economy and not stand in the way of it."
Source: The Wall Street Journal
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