CPD IN THE NEWS

The Sur Real Estate - February 14, 2013 - Yesterday, I attended an inspiring conference called “Workers Rising: a Symposium on Low-Wage Worker Organizing in NYC” put together by The Center for Popular Democracy and United NY. The conference’s energy was incredible- the main room was packed with folks standing in the back, crouching along the walls.  A wide range of people contributed working in sectors ranging from organizing, law, policy, city government, academics, and of course people working in low-wage jobs.

Here are some of the most important take-aways:

-A new labor movement has sprung up in the past year in which previously uncharted territories of the labor industry are being organized.  Industries such as fast food and retail, for example, are organizing workers who often work for minimum wage ($7.25 in NYC).  These workers are widely thought to be students looking for part time jobs, actors, or those looking to make an extra buck.  Contrary to this assumption, the majority of fast food workers and those in the retail industry are attempting to work in those industries full time, depending on that work to support themselves and their families.

-Successful attempts to organize car wash workers, taxi drivers, and domestic workers are taking place across New York City

-New York City is coordinating organizing its low-wage worker campaigns with other efforts across the country- mostly in LA and Chicago.  Organizers are sharing successful organizing strategies and change the face of the industry nation-wide. This collaboration across job sectors and cities clarifies that these efforts are part of a larger movement rather than isolated events.

-A great deal of organizing taking place in NYC is happening through “worker centers” and in collaboration with community groups rather than through unions.  Groups like Retail Action Project, New York Communities for Changeand OUR Walmart are organizing workers outside of the traditional union structures.

-Integrating labor and other issues (notably immigration reform) is crucial to create real change in labor.  Immigration reform will impact millions of low-wage workers across NYC, as well as the way the workplace functions.  Important to note as well is the growing shift from full-time workers to outsourcing and employing temps in all sorts of industries, including fast food. This, according to many of the panelists, will only increase as more immigrants gain rights as legal residents or citizens.  Immigration polices which promote guest-workers and outsourcing create challenges for organizing and regulation of rights in the workplace.

-The Center for Popular Democracy and United NY released a report entitiled “Workers Rising: Organizing Service Jobs for Shared Prosperity in New York City.” The report puts forth 4 sets of actions to improve the lives of low-wage workers in New York City. The actions are that:

The city should pass legislation that would ensure at least five days of paid sick leave (Earned Sick Leave Act) and protect workers from erratic scheduling (Predictable Scheduling Act)

NY should better regulate high-violation industries, and pass laws like the Car Wash Accountability Act and creating an “enhanced privileged permitting” system at airports

The City should create a “Mayor’s Office of Labor Standards” to educate employers, investigate worker complaints, and enforce worker rights

 NYC should modify its “home rule” authority in order to set a citywide minimum wage, which would be higher than the current state minimum wage.

As an organizer with UHAB, this conference helped me to connect tenant struggles with their apartments to their struggles in the workplace.  I work with one tenant leader, Ms. D., in Crown Heights who deals with horrible building conditions and a frustrating situation with an absentee landlord. In addition, she works as a home health aid, working hard for little pay.  Not only has Ms. D stepped up as a tenant leader in her building, but she has also begun attending union meetings and standing up for her rights in the workplace. It must be hard and frustrating  but Ms. D is working to create change in several aspects of her life, tackling huge issues through collective action.

Attending this conference reminded me that labor organizers need to work housing organizers who need to work with community organizers.  Everyone has the same goal: to give low-income New Yorkers a bigger voice in how they are treated, as well as to assert and expand their rights.  Keep up the good work!

Source

Latin post - January 21, 2015, by Michael Oleaga - The National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) welcomed Obama's efforts to improve the economy and education for Latinos, and all other Americans.

"These policies can allow more Latinos to rebound from the economic troubles experienced in recent years and pursue their piece of the American Dream, resulting in a more skilled work force and an expanded middle class that is able to 'do their fair share' and fully contribute to our nation's prosperity," added NALEO in a statement.

On immigration, NALEO said passing comprehensive immigration reform, which should include a pathway to citizenship, will help undocumented immigrants integrate with U.S. life and contribute to the growing economy and shrinking deficit.

"Action to bring immigrants who have played by the rules fully into our economy and democracy is not only the right thing to do, but also the smart thing to do," added NALEO. "Immigrants who learn English can on average quadruple their annual incomes, resulting in increased revenues at the state and federal level and a more skilled workforce that will reinforce our ability to prosper in the new global economy."

The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the largest organization comprising of unions, commended the president for advocating for working families.

"The President's focus on raising wages through collective bargaining, better paying jobs, a fairer tax code, fair overtime rules, and expanded access to education and earned leave sent the right message at the right time," said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. "So did his embrace of union apprentices and immigrants who want to achieve the American Dream. The President has again demonstrated his strong commitment to creating an economy that truly works for all working people."

Trumka said income inequality remains one of the biggest challenges despite the world's wealth being in "the hands of a very few." He also said the time has come for Congress to address minimum wage.

On climate change, 350.org, an organization which address the issue and opponent of the Keystone XL pipeline, gave their support for the president. 

"He said we need to think beyond a single pipeline, and made a strong case for developing sustainable, clean energy sources like wind and solar," said 350.org Executive Director May Boeve. "The President is clearly beginning to think about his climate legacy, and he clearly understands that it depends on rejecting Keystone XL."

Boeve said this year's State of the Union address was a vast improvement compared to previous speeches, specifically the 2011 address which had no mention of climate change. She acknowledged climate change was addressed among a few paragraphs and attributed to last September's People's Climate March for increasing awareness of the issue.

Center for Popular Democracy Co-Executive Director Ana Maria Archila applauded Obama's progress but said a "range of daunting crises" still exists for U.S. workers, communities of color and immigrants. Archila noted the crises include climate change, racial injustice, and immigrant and workers' rights.

"The president's speech barely addressed racial inequalities and the discriminatory policing that threatens far too many communities of color," said Archila. "The president was right to point out 'different takes on Ferguson and New York,' but families of color who wonder if they, and their children, are safe when crossing paths with the police need stronger national leadership to confront police impunity."

Archila recognized Obama's emphasis for a higher federal minimum wage, child care, and paid sick leave for working families. She added that full-time workers should not be stuck in poverty or encounter the inhumane choice between a paycheck and caring for their family.

"We commend the president for speaking from the right place and with the right intentions. We will continue to fight to build an innovative, pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial and economic agenda. The work ahead of us is real, and we are moving forward," said Archila.

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Con pancartas en mano un grupo de jóvenes inmigrantes y partidarios se reunieron este miércoles frente a la oficina de la senadora demócrata de California Dianne Feinstein en Los Ángeles para pedirle que luche por la aprobación del Dream Act.

Lea el artículo completo aquí.

Over the past few years, two movements have exploded into the public’s consciousness. In the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder and police killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland and many other people of color, Black Lives Matter has emerged as a powerful set of voices calling for racial justice, including an end to racially motivated violence.

At the same time, a growing movement of low-wage workers demanding higher wages and paid sick time has led some corporations to improve their policies for workers, and to dozens of localities and states adopting minimum wage increases and paid sick days laws.

The next frontier in the fight for fair workplaces is job scheduling. Protests by retail and food workers, high-profile New York Times articles, and other subsequent media coverage of workers experiencing erratic, unpredictable schedules has led to public outcry, the introduction of federal legislation to improve work schedules, and more than a dozen state and local proposed laws.

There is considerable overlap between these issues and the activists that are at the center of both movements. As Ron Harris, an organizer at the Twin Cities-based group Neighborhoods Organizing for Change (NOC), explains, people “don’t live single-issue lives. … The people getting shot are low-wage folks. … They are over-policed and under-resourced.”

I spoke with Harris to learn how NOC is leading the fight for fair scheduling in Minneapolis by taking an approach grounded in a commitment to racial justice. The campaign demonstrates the possibilities that emerge when advocates connect the dots between job quality issues and racial justice in their strategy and messaging.

Tell me about your organization, Neighborhoods Organizing for Change (NOC)

NOC is a non-profit that focuses on work at the intersection of race, public policy and the economy. Our members are primarily low-wage Black folks living in north Minneapolis. Our mission is to shift the balance of power between folks who have and folks who don’t have, and in our opinion, the folks who don’t have are low-income black people in Minneapolis.

We derive a lot of our ideas about what issues we will work on from the bottom up. At monthly meetings called “issue cuts,” we discuss the issues and members vet the ones we will work on.

This past year we worked on a series of local future of work proposals, including fair scheduling, earned sick and safe time [time to deal with domestic or sexual violence], a policy to end rampant wage theft and raising the minimum wage to $15. We’re also working on police reform; we made a series of demands of our local police department, and in 2016 we will take those to the state level. We led the charge in repealing two laws that only two cities in the country have—“lurking laws” and “spitting laws.”

If you spit in Minneapolis, for instance, you can get a misdemeanor. These laws were targeting low-income black people, black men in particular. We beat that law in Minneapolis—now it is gone.  

We also work on voter restoration. There are approximately 47,000 people in Minnesota who don’t have the right to vote because of a past criminal conviction. We’re working on a bill at the state level to end that. And we’re working with the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) on their Federal Reserve campaign, engaging with National Fed and Local Fed banks in town, working on influencing economic policy and who is elected to those boards.

How has NOC been involved with organizing and advocacy related to fair scheduling in the Twin Cities?

We got involved with fair scheduling because members of our base were coming in saying they were working jobs where they didn’t know their schedule until the day before or even the day of. They were forced to close businesses and come right back and open up the next morning. We call this “clopening.”

So we started to work with national partners, CPD included, to come up with a fair scheduling policy that mirrors work in other cities and states. Our state government is divided [between Republicans and Democrats], so we thought we’d take this to the city level.

NOC has been heavily involved in crafting the policy. This is where the “issue cut” came in. There were a series of generic provisions in the first scheduling policy and we laid these out for our membership and asked our membership base: “What do these sound like? Are they too strong? Too weak? What’s missing?” It led to a tailored approach that reflected the voices of the members.

On the field side, we gathered hundreds and hundreds of stories of people experiencing these scheduling issues. As we gathered their stories, we brought members to city hall and took them on lobbying visits.

Why is scheduling a racial justice issue?

If you think about the folks who are the most likely to have an unfair schedule and the least likely to be able do something about, at that intersection it tends to be people of color, particularly women of color.

If they don’t have access to a fair schedule, they are likely working a low-wage job, and if they are in a low-wage job, they likely have inadequate access to transportation… and you can see how there is a domino effect.

Why is it important to frame public discussions of fair scheduling in terms of racial justice?

We frame it as a racial justice issue because, living in Minneapolis, we have some of the worst economic disparity gaps in the country. With those dynamics, we almost had to frame it that way. We thought this could be an opportunity to close some of these gaps.

The thousand of stories we collected about employers hiring new people instead of giving out more hours to their current employees or getting schedules the day before people were supposed to work—all of those stories were coming from low-income communities of color, so frankly, that was the only way we could frame it.

We thought that our city leaders and elected officials would be sensitive to the opportunity to close the gap. In 2013, a majority of the city council was elected running on some kind of racial equity platform. So, our messages to the media and to elected officials were the same: “Hey, the folks that we donated to and endorsed ran on a racial equity platform and we haven’t seen any action from them for the past couple of years. We need this now. Here’s a perfect opportunity for you to close these gaps.”

We also tried to connect the dots, highlighting that the people most likely to suffer from [unfair schedules] are those with black and brown faces. Refusing to act means that you really don’t care about these gaps. It means, you ran on these things, but you’re really not committed to acting on them.

In your outreach to “high-road” employers, is it useful to discuss the connection between scheduling and racial inequity?

We’ve been working on really trying to engage people across sectors in fixing these gaps. So, for example, it’s not just the role of the community to advocate for itself and to bring awareness to this issue.  The business community has a role, too. We recognize employers’ value as job creators, but also emphasize that by changing some of their worksite practices, they can also be adding to the movement. 

We frame this for employers as: “Do the best you can where you are. We all have an opportunity. We all have a role.” And it really worked with some employers.

Even though the legislation wasn’t ultimately brought to vote, because of the campaign that we ran and the stories that were brought to light, some business owners are reporting that they are already changing their practices. Maybe they were giving their schedules five days in advance and now they’re going to work towards 10 days. One landscaping company used to say, you don’t leave until the job is done. Now they say if it is 6:00 P.M. and you aren’t done, just go home and be with your family.

Although we haven’t had much luck with large chain employers, one exception is Target. They have committed to changing their scheduling practices, almost in lockstep with what we have been pushing. We have talked about this as a racial justice issue with Target. We’ve said, as the largest employer in the city, they have a really unique opportunity to make an impact [on racial equity]. They also want their customers to have more money in their pockets—they need a strong economic environment, too.

The movement for racial justice has been gaining strength and momentum around the country in the wake of police killings. Within that movement, do you think there is enough attention to job quality and fair workplace issues?

Nationally, no. Locally, definitely. With NOC and Black Lives Matter, yes, we’re talking about police brutality, but also an overall culture of injustice that exists. In Minneapolis, in particular, some of the chants are we don’t want to get shot by police—but we also want a $15 minimum wage and all these other things.

The intersection of race and the economy has been really strong here. It’s a compounding effect where if you pay attention to the folks who are getting brutalized by the police, these aren’t middle class and rich folks. These are low-income black people. They are getting stopped because they are walking down the street when they are “not supposed to be,” technically. The people getting shot by police are low-wage folks—they are over-policed and under-resourced.

What could the fair scheduling movement be doing to further highlight the racial justice aspects of scheduling issues?

Really to ground the work in story telling. Make sure you have a strong base of individuals who are actually going through [unfair scheduling] who can speak from experience. No one can deny someone’s story. Stories help to justify everything you do.

Also, get the data. We gathered data that shows that the people who are most likely to work the jobs that have unfair schedules, they are black and brown, and most likely women. The data alone reflects that this is a racial justice issue.

Build a broad-based coalition, including people who understand how to do racial analysis and member based organizations, so the members can really speak for themselves.

How can scheduling advocates support the work of racial justice advocates?

If you think about it, if people are advocating for police reform, criminal justice reform, the people they are standing up for are people who are working these crappy jobs. So, fair scheduling advocates just need to stand up and say, our people are the same exact people. They don’t lead single-issue lives, they lead lives that are compounding multiple issues.