The Fed’s about to try something that almost always has ended in recession
The Fed’s about to try something that almost always has ended in recession
The Federal Reserve‘s looming attempt to shrink its mammoth portfolio of bonds comes with an ugly track record:...
The Federal Reserve‘s looming attempt to shrink its mammoth portfolio of bonds comes with an ugly track record: Virtually every time the central bank has tried it in the past, recessions have followed.
Over the past several months, the Fed has prepared markets for the upcoming effort to reduce the $4.5 trillion it currently holds of mostly Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities. The balance sheet ballooned as the Fed sought to stimulate the economy out of its financial crisis morass.
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Businesses Support Raising The Minimum Wage. Why Doesn’t The Business Lobby?
Businesses Support Raising The Minimum Wage. Why Doesn’t The Business Lobby?
Raising the minimum wage. More paid sick leave and family leave. More stable scheduling for workers. When a major...
Raising the minimum wage. More paid sick leave and family leave. More stable scheduling for workers. When a major Republican-friendly polling shop surveyed CEOs across the country about these typically left-leaning policies, one thing was made clear: they overwhelmingly support them.
So when it came to presenting the results to the Council of State Chambers of Commerce, which commissioned the research, the pollsters had a challenge on their hands — how to reconcile the widespread opposition to these policies by many business lobby groups with their popularity among the people actually running businesses.
In a recorded webinar, David Merritt, the managing director of polling firm LuntzGlobal, described the “empathy” CEOs feel for workers along with their support for labor-friendly policies. “If you ask about them in isolation, of course we want to take care of people who are caring for a loved one. Of course we want to give folks more benefits or more leave or more income.”
In the presentation, obtained by liberal advocacy group the Center for Media and Democracy, Merritt told the business lobbyists that executives expressed widespread support for a number of policies that are vehemently opposed by conservative politicians.
Based on their survey of 1,000 executives, LuntzGlobal found 80% supported raising their state minimum wage, 82% supported increasing paid parental leave requirements and 73% supported increasing paid sick leave. The Washington Post first reported details of the presentation.
“If you’re fighting against a minimum wage increase, you’re fighting an uphill battle,” Merritt said in the presentation. “Because most Americans, even most Republicans, support raising a minimum wage.”
He went on to coach participants on how to oppose those policies anyhow.
“A lot of you guys have minimum wage battles at the state level. If you are fighting those fights, the best way to fight it is not to talk about the minimum wage,” he said. “If you can, turn it into a federal issue and talk about the Earned Income Tax Credit.”
Joe Crosby, Director of the Council of State Chambers, which commissioned the research, said in a statement that the survey was intended “to benchmark trends on current political issues” and “it primarily covered mid-sized and larger companies, not the smaller businesses that are most affected by wage and leave mandates.”
LuntzGlobal, founded by prominent Republican pollster and consultant Frank Luntz, was unable to comment, per the terms of its contract wit the Council of State Chambers, Crosby said.
“We have known for years”
Advocates for these worker-friendly policies said the findings are proof their cause has many allies in the business community — even if those allies aren’t often the most outspoken voices representing business interests in Washington and state houses.
“We have known for years what this research confirms: that an overwhelming share of business leaders support paid sick days, paid leave and other family friendly policies,” said Debra L. Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families, a group that advocates for paid leave.
At one point in the call, Merritt held up language from the group Ness belongs to (below) as polling higher among executives than any other.
“I wouldn’t have changed anything about this statement,” Merritt said in the presentation. “This was the clear winner — from the National Partnership for Women and Families… Perfect, perfect language.”
Business lobby groups like the various state-level chambers of commerce are “not currently representing the views of their members — and doing that at the expense of single moms and hard-working parents,” said Elianne Farhat, who runs the Fair Workweek Initiative, a campaign of the Center For Popular Democracy, a liberal advocacy group. “In every place fair workweek laws are moving, the chambers of commerce have been the loudest voices of opposition.”
But Crosby, the Director of the Council of State Chambers, said the real question at issue is whether labor regulations should be forced onto all businesses by law, not whether businesses support the goal of better pay and working conditions. “Of course business owners support raising wages and benefits for their employees; those are goals they work for every day,” he wrote in an email to BuzzFeed News. “But one-size-fits-all government mandates simply don’t work.”
A spokesperson for the National Restaurant Association, the industry’s largest trade group and one of the loudest voices opposing minimum wake hikes, said its members are more sensitive to labor costs than those in other industries. “The Council of State Chambers represents a diverse range of businesses, including tech and manufacturing companies, that could adapt to increased labor costs more easily” than restaurant and fast food owners, said NRA spokesperson Christin Fernandez.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the federal body representing the country’s business community, echoed concerns that pro-labor policies would negatively affect employers.
“The U.S. Chamber, based on input from our members, continues to believe that imposing higher labor costs on employers, especially small businesses, will force them to cut back elsewhere, and will ultimately price low and un-skilled workers out of entry level job opportunities,” said Randy Johnson, senior vice president of Labor, Immigration, and Employee Benefits for the Chamber, in a statement.
Asked about the chamber’s position on paid family and sick leave, as well as predictive scheduling, all of which polled well in the survey, spokeswoman Blair Holmes wrote that the Chamber is “careful to be responsive and in synch” with the business community it represents.
“The only point we will make is to say we have not lobbied on these issues in any of the states,” she said, adding that the federal group “is not in a position to comment on the positions these state chambers may have taken” with respect to raising the minimum wage or paid leave and “will not comment on state or local versions of predictive scheduling legislation.”
On its website, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce lists among its 2016 priorities: “Oppose efforts to increase the minimum wage and to index the minimum wage to inflation,” and “Oppose attempts to make FMLA [Family and Medical Leave Act] leave paid or to mandate paid sick leave.”
By Cora Lewis
Source
GOP accuses Dems of stalling Kavanaugh over document requests
GOP accuses Dems of stalling Kavanaugh over document requests
Jennifer Epps-Addison, network president at the grassroots Center for Popular Democracy, stressed that public access to...
Jennifer Epps-Addison, network president at the grassroots Center for Popular Democracy, stressed that public access to Kavanaugh's legal opinions and documents from his time in the Bush administration is "the bare minimum of transparency Americans should expect before confirming a Supreme Court nominee."
Read the full article here.
‘Patriot’ Dimon dodges calls to disavow Trump policies
‘Patriot’ Dimon dodges calls to disavow Trump policies
By Ben McLannahan Jamie Dimon endured a rough ride at the annual meeting of America’s biggest bank on Tuesday morning,...
By Ben McLannahan
Jamie Dimon endured a rough ride at the annual meeting of America’s biggest bank on Tuesday morning, as shareholders repeatedly attacked the JPMorgan Chase chief over his ties to the administration of Donald Trump.
In December Mr Dimon was named chairman of the Business Roundtable, a group of almost 200 CEOs which is among the most prominent lobbying groups in Washington. Mr Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan for the past 11 years and chairman for 10, is also a member of Mr Trump’s strategic and policy forum, which meets regularly to shape the economic agenda.
At the meeting in Wilmington, Delaware, a succession of shareholders challenged Mr Dimon to publicly disavow some of Mr Trump’s policies, such as his curbs on immigration from predominantly Muslim countries and his building a wall on the border with Mexico. One shareholder noted that users had sent more than 4000 messages to a website, backersofhate.org, urging Mr Dimon to “distance himself from hateful policies of human suffering”.
After staying silent throughout several speeches from the floor, Mr Dimon defended the bank’s record on Mexico, its support for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, and its funding of private prisons.
Finally, he said of Mr Trump: “He is the president of the United States, he is the pilot flying the aeroplane. I’d try to help any president of the US because I’m a patriot. That does not mean I agree with every policy he is trying to implement.”
Mr Dimon has long been the most outspoken of the big-bank chiefs in the US, often using his shareholder letter as a platform for taking positions on matters of public policy, and for challenging the regulatory framework put in place since the 2008 crisis.
In the weeks after the presidential election, the 61 year old was approached by members of Mr Trump’s transition team to serve as Treasury secretary but declined, saying he was unsuited to the role, according to people familiar with the discussions.
As hostile questioning resumed after his remarks at the Tuesday meeting, Mr Dimon tried to lighten the mood, saying “you’re starting to hurt my feelings”. The shareholder admonished him by saying that just by hearing him out, the chief executive would earn more than $100.
“I hope it’s worth it!” said Mr Dimon, who was paid $28m last year.
“This is not a laughing matter,” the shareholder replied.
The meeting stood in contrast to the peaceful gathering at the Goldman Sachs building in Jersey City at the end of last month, when chief executive Lloyd Blankfein faced just two questions from the floor, both of them friendly. Mr Blankfein, who is also chairman of the board, closed the meeting within just 24 minutes.
Mr Dimon wrapped up Tuesday’s proceedings by saying the entire board “takes this feedback seriously”.
Ana Maria Archila, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, said after the meeting that until Mr Dimon takes a stronger stand her organisation would continue to associate JPMorgan Chase with Mr Trump’s “anti-immigration” agenda.
Ms Archila arrived in America 20 years ago to reunite with her father, who had fled political violence in Colombia.
“I don’t think we have a plan to really inflict economic damages on the bank just yet,” she said. “But what we do have a plan for, is to force them to clarify whose side they’re on.”
Scam Central: Elizabeth Warren Tells Wells Fargo CEO to Resign and Get It Over With
Scam Central: Elizabeth Warren Tells Wells Fargo CEO to Resign and Get It Over With
Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf was on the hot seat Tuesday when he faced Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and other...
Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf was on the hot seat Tuesday when he faced Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and other angry lawmakers at a Senate Banking Committee hearing designed to investigate the bank’s widespread rip-off of its customers.
Warren told Stumpf, who earns $19 million a year: “You should resign... You should be criminally investigated.”
Wells Fargo is the nation’s fourth largest bank by assets and its leading home lender.
Warren’s verbal assault on Stumpf generated considerable publicity. But this issue wouldn’t have surfaced in the first place without the hard work of several grassroots community and labor organizations, especially the Committee for Better Banks, that first brought the scandal to the attention of the media, elected officials and regulators.
Warren demanded both the Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission criminally investigate Stumpf for Wells Fargo’s practice of pressuring its low-level employees to create over 2 million unwanted checking and credit-card accounts without consumers’ knowledge or permission in order to grow the bank’s stock price. Warren reminded Stumpf that during the years Wells Fargo engaged in this “scam,” Stumpf’s own portfolio of company stock increased by $200 million.
She urged Stumpf to return the compensation he received while these practices went on.
“So, you haven’t resigned, you haven’t returned a single nickel of your personal earnings, you haven’t fired a single senior executive,” Warren told Stumpf. “Instead, evidently, your definition of accountable is to push the blame to your low-level employees who don’t have the money for a fancy PR firm to defend themselves. It’s gutless leadership.”
“You squeezed your employees to the breaking point so they would cheat customers and you could drive up the value of your stock and put hundreds of millions of dollars in your own pocket,” Warren said.
Wells Fargo’s official line is that the employees were acting on their own to skim extra pay from the bogus accounts. Warren questioned Stumpf about the fraudulent accounts, asking how such an operation could have occurred without the knowledge of top management.
Wells Fargo employees say they did so because of what they call the bank’s “sell or die” quota system, which put pressure on employees to engage in these practices in order to keep their jobs. They said it was a routine practice employees referred to as “sandbagging.”
Activists are up in arms over Wells Fargo’s double standard in dealing with its employees. After the scandal was exposed by grassroots advocates, the media, and government regulators, the bank fired at least 5,300 employees and refunded millions of dollars to customers. But bank reform activists are skeptical that so many employees could have acted on their own without the knowledge of higher-up bank executives.
Meanwhile, in July, in the wake of the scandal, Carrie Tolstedt, Wells Fargo’s director of consumer banking, the operation that opened the fake accounts, abruptly left the bank where she had worked for 27 years. She took with her a $124.5 million bonus. After her retirement announcement, Stumpf praised Tolstedt as “a standard-bearer of our culture” and “a champion for our customers.”
Warren criticized Stumpf for failing to withdraw Tolstedt’s bonus (a practice known as a “clawback”) in light of the revelations about her division’s behavior. Stumpf said it was up to the bank’s compensation committee, comprised of board members, to decide whether to rescind Tolstedt’s bonus.
“If you have no opinions on the most massive fraud that’s hit this bank since the beginning of time, how can it be that you get to continue to collect a paycheck?” Warren asked.
Moreover, activists say that the problem goes well beyond Wells Fargo and is an industry-wide scandal.
Ruth Landaverde, a former employee at both Wells Fargo and Bank of America, said the pressure from her supervisors at both banks was so intense she developed a tic in her eye and had trouble sleeping. She told the Associated Press that in order to keep her job she was required to sell four credit cards and four auto loans each week in addition to three home mortgages or refinances.
“I wasn’t going to do something unethical, but the sales pressure was very real,” she said. “I can see why some employees did what they did.”
Landaverde is now a member of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, a statewide advocacy group that works on housing and banking issues and is a member of the Committee for Better Banks, a coalition of community and labor groups. In an email this week to ACCE members and supporters, she wrote:
“When I worked for Bank of America, I felt uncomfortable when I was given a list of bank customers and told to call them and push new accounts and credit cards that could end up sticking them with unnecessary fees and debt. What’s worse, we were targeting customers in low-income communities of color much more than the customers in more affluent zip codes.”
Landaverde said that “there are still many more banks that have not committed to stop requiring their employees to push unnecessary products in order to keep their jobs. And now, Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf is throwing his own employees under the bus rather than accepting responsibility for the outrageous high-pressure sales culture that he and other Wall Street executives are creating!”
“I know first-hand that predatory sales exist across the U.S. banking industry,” said Cassaundra Plummer, a former teller at TD Bank and member of the Committee for Better Banks. “At TD bank, sales goals made it impossible for frontline bank workers to help customers find the financial products best suited to them. My manager would encourage customers to take out home equity lines to go on vacation which is the worst financial advice I’ve ever heard. We need to end predatory sales goals across the industry, not just Wells Fargo.”
Last year the Committee for Better Banks delivered a petition signed by more than 11,000 people to Stumpf, along with a letter noting that workers faced “pressures to meet sales quotas under strict monitoring and threat of losing their jobs, often forcing them to push unnecessary products and fees on to their customers, causing them stress and financial hardship,” and that loan servicing departments have been using similar tactics to push consumers toward riskier products they can ill afford.
The group has now launched another petition asking elected leaders in Los Angeles and other cities around the country to ban all city business with banks that force their employees to meet sales goals for high fee products such as credit cards, new accounts and home refinance loans. They say that these incentive programs create a system where bank workers are forced to engage in predatory practices against their professional and ethical beliefs.
“Wells Fargo’s action to eliminate sales quotas is a hard-won victory for front-line bank workers who have been denouncing abusive sales goals for over two years,” said Reuben Traite, an organizer with Committee for Better Banks. “The fact that Wells Fargo turned a blind eye is appalling. But these high pressure sales goals are rampant across big banks and we need to end it across the industry.”
Activists with the Los Angeles chapter of ACCE brought the issue to the attention of the Los Angeles Times, which broke the story in 2013. Once it made the papers, Los Angeles City Attorney Michael Feuer conducted his own investigation and then sued Wells Fargo. All that got the attention of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal agency created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank bank reform law.
Last week, CFPB director Richard Cordray, Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry, and Feuer announced that they had reached settlements with Wells Fargo over its “major breach of trust.” Wells Fargo agreed to pay CFPB $100 million (the largest fine the agency has ever imposed) in addition to $50 million to the city and county of Los Angeles and $35 million to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Wells Fargo did not admit any wrongdoing in the settlements, although it issued an apology to its customers, promised to revise its sales practices, and agreed to refund consumers for fees assessed on checking and credit cards accounts they didn’t authorize.
Activists point out that the fines being levied against Wells Fargo are a drop in the bucket compared with Wells Fargo’s 2015 profits of $20 billion. It is even less than the more than $200 million in company stock that Stumpf owns. He serves on the board of directors of Target Corporation and Chevron Corporation, and until recently, on the board of the Financial Services Roundtable, a powerful industry lobby group.
The bank’s apology and refunds won’t make the issue go away. Many consumers are suing the bank as are former employees who say they were fired (or forced to resign) when they refused to engage in the fraudulent practices in order to meet the bank’s unrealistic sales quotas.
The issue first emerged in 2013 when the Los Angeles Times uncovered Wells Fargo’s illegal practices. In response to the Times story, Feuer initiated his own investigation and sued the bank, alleging it had “victimized their customers by using pernicious and often illegal sales tactics,” including unattainable quotas that pressured bank employees to “engage in fraudulent behavior.”
The CFPB undertook its own investigation and discovered that Wells Fargo employees opened as many as 1.5 million checking and savings accounts, and more than 500,000 credit cards, without consumers’ knowledge or permission.
The LA and CFPB investigations, the resulting media coverage, and Wells Fargo’s attempt to blame its lower-rung employees for the scandal led five Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee — Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Jack Reed (R.I.), Robert Menendez (N.J.), Jeff Merkley (Ore.), and Warren — to push its Republican chairman, Richard Shelby of Alabama, to holdTuesday’s hearings. They sent Strumpf a letter last week expressing concern that consumers and low-level employees will bear the burden of the bank’s misconduct “while senior executives walk away with multimillion-dollar awards based on what the company later finds out are fraudulent practices.”
The San Francisco-based Wells Fargo has long been a target of bank reform activists for its troublesome track record of risky and reckless behavior. For more than a decade, grassroots groups have challenged Wells Fargo’s racially discriminatory lending practices and aggressive foreclosures. They have picketed at the offices and homes of the bank’s top executives, sued the bank for violating laws against racist mortgage lending, and testified before Congress, state legislatures and city councils demanding that they investigate and rein in Wells Fargo’s troublesome practices.
The activists have primarily been bank consumers and residents of neighborhoods harmed by Wells Fargo’s redlining and other practices. But the two-year-old Committee for Better Banks is comprised of bank employees as well as consumers, representing a new and potentially powerful coalition. Not surprisingly, the Committee for Better Banks is now part of the broader movement to raise wages for service-sector employees like bank tellers to $15 an hour.
The CBB is aligned with the Center for Popular Democracy, a national network of local activist groups that work on housing, banking, and workers rights issues. CPD helped set the stage for the current campaign with its study of bank workers. The CPD report revealed that some of the nation’s largest banks, including Wells Fargo and Citigroup, pressure front-line employees to engage in fraudulent practices to keep their jobs. According to the report, the bank employees try to serve customers responsibly, but feel pressure from higher-ups to meet the quotas.
A report last year by the National Employment Law Center on banking industry wages found that almost three quarters (74.1 percent) of U.S. bank tellers and almost half (44.2 percent) of bank customer service representatives earn less than $15 an hour. The median hourly wage for bank tellers is $12.44. A study by the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education found that nearly one-third of the families of all tellers are on public assistance. In New York City, the capital of the nation’s banking industry, 39 percent of tellers and their family members are on some form of public assistance program.
Other groups involved in the better banking campaign include Move On, the Communication Workers of America, New York Communities for Change, ACCE, Jobs with Justice, Make the Road, and Americans for Financial Reform, a DC-based watchdog group.
GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has called for dismantling nearly all of the Dodd-Frank reforms. In contrast, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton last week touted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's “forceful response” to the Wells Fargo scandal, adding that it was “a stark reminder of why we need a strong consumer watchdog to safeguard against unfair and deceptive practices.”
Lisa Donner, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform, a DC-based watchdog group that has played an important part in defending the CFPB from its opponents, said, “The current Wells Fargo scandal reveals why we need a strong regulatory agency that has the backs of bank consumers as well as employees.”
“Wells Fargo’s action to eliminate sales quotas is a hard-won victory for front-line bank workers like me who have been coming together in the Committee for Better Banks and working to end to high-pressure sales goals that hurt our families and communities,” said Julie Miller, a former Wells Fargo branch manager and a member of the Committee for Better Banks.
“Wells Fargo got into this scandal because it turned a deaf ear to the alarms sounded by consumers and its own workers, and its experience proves that these sales goals have no place in the consumer banking industry,” Miller said. “Predatory sales goals are rampant at big banks across the country, and we will keep on working and organizing to make sure Wells Fargo makes good on its word and that other banks follow suit by implementing fair business practices for workers and customers.”
By Peter Dreier
Source
New Orleans experience a warning to Texas
Behind Frenemy Lines - May 10, 2014, by Jason Stanford - This is a typical day for Greg Abbott’s gubernatorial bid: He...
Behind Frenemy Lines - May 10, 2014, by Jason Stanford - This is a typical day for Greg Abbott’s gubernatorial bid: He goes into the office, screws up his own campaign and goes home. If it weren’t for his mistakes—Ted Nugent, thanking a supporter who called Wendy Davis “retard Barbie”, calling South Texas a “Third-World Country”, and his bungled opposition to equal pay come to mind—Abbott would seem to have no campaign at all. But it’s when you separate the wheat from the gaffe on education that Abbott’s campaign looks like a disaster waiting to happen.
The negative coverage of Abbott’s education plan—and boy howdy has there been a lot—is focused on Abbott’s mistakes. His education plan cites Charles Murray, whose retrograde views on race and gender got him called a “White Nationalist” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. On page 20, his plan calls for “standardized tests” in pre-K. As a dodge, his campaign spokesmanclaimed that was in the plan “for informational purposes only.” And then he cancels campaign events at public schools when the Davis campaign points out that the schools are suing him over funding cuts.
But behind this façade of denials, backpedaling, and obliviousness sits the luckiest man in American politics, because almost no one has bothered to discuss his idea to create “takeover districts” for low-performing schools. He has reportedly modeled his plan on the privatization reforms in New Orleans.
That last bit should scare you. Education reformers—that is, those who think private charters would do better than public schools at educating poor children—call the Recovery School District in New Orleans a success. If the RSD is a success, I’m the third baseman for the Baltimore Orioles. No matter how much I wish that to be true, the facts say otherwise. Here’s why:
No one argues that schools in New Orleans were turning out Harvard scholars by the boatload, so the legislature created the RSD, a takeover district as Abbott has conceived. Davis also supports recovery districts, but Abbott likes the New Orleans model in which “failing” schools would be run by private charters that promised to get the schools shipshape and back into the public school system within five years.
Before taking a look at the results, we must first figure out what “failure” means, because they keep moving that target. RSD used to takeover any school that failed to get a passing score of 60 on the state performance index. After Katrina, the legislature changed that to allow RSD to scoop up any school that fell short of the state’s 87.4 average. The New Orleans private charter district took over 94 schools, 26 of which met the old passing standard. The state redefined failure to mean below average so more schools could get privatized.
Almost a decade later, the takeover district in New Orleans has failed to turn around even one school, so “improvement” became the new goal. Not one school has received an “A” or even a “B” grade. In fact, RSD stopped disclosing the grades their schools received, preferring to publicize percentages of improvement without disclosing the underlying data or that they were cherry-picking the data every year, making it impossible to honestly chart progress. By their original standards, though, all the RSD schools are still failing.
Remember, Louisiana was throwing millions of tax dollars at what were essentially startup small businesses. Fraud and bankruptcy are commonplace, and if you think that’s confined to New Orleans, think again.
Integrity in Education and the Center for Popular Democracy looked at 15 states that have charter schools, one of which was Texas and found “rampant fraud, waste and abuse,” according to a report released last week. The two groups found numerous cases of embezzlement, misuse of tax dollars, child endangerment, bilking taxpayers for services not rendered, inflated enrollment numbers, and general mismanagement. Private charters are running schools like a business. Unfortunately, that business is Wall Street.
It’s never the schools in the wealthy neighborhoods that get taken over. On average, poor children score worse than their wealthier peers. We have always known that, but we cannot get poor children to achieve in school simply by insisting they act like wealthy children.
Now Abbott is using the false dogma of education reform as cover to give up on public schools. Giving up on public schools will not fix public schools, but if Abbott becomes governor, he’ll go into the office every morning, screw up public schools, and go home.
Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Source
By A Thousand Cuts: The Complex Face of Wage Theft in New York
In recent years—at least as far back as the passage of the New York Wage Theft Prevention Act of 2010, through 2015,...
In recent years—at least as far back as the passage of the New York Wage Theft Prevention Act of 2010, through 2015, when a series of New York Times articles explored the shocking extent of wage theft and other workplace abuses in the nail salon industry—mainstream elected officials and the press alike have turned meaningful attention to the problem of wage theft in New York State and nationwide. The question is what remains to be done. This brief study does not attempt to answer that question fully, but begins the inquiry by delving into the shape that wage theft takes in New York City and statewide.
Download the report here
Case studies in this report focus on particular employers that low-wage worker advocates have identified as illustrating broader problems in sectors where wage theft is prevalent.
Though this study is merely an entry point to a much broader and deeper analysis, our results point to some common-sense first steps in improving wage theft enforcement in New York City, New York State, and beyond.
Recommendations include the following:
City, state and federal government should invest in rigorous social science and economic research to evaluate what types of education, enforcement, penalties, and damages are most successful in encouraging workers and others to blow the whistle on wage theft, compensating directly impacted workers, and deterring and reducing wage theft. Our legislative and regulatory approach to penalizing wage theft and retaliation should be reevaluated to take into account the impact that wage theft and retaliation have not only on the directly impacted workers but also on competing employers, entire geographic areas, sectors, and the economy. Outreach, education, and enforcement efforts need to be tailored to address the specific situations of certain sectors, ethnic groups, and communities. Government should partner with, and resource, community-based partners who have established trust in hard-to-reach communities of workers and employers. Government should partner with community and labor organizations with expertise in specific sectors and types of wage theft, to assist in bringing forward adequate and accurate testimony and evidence to evaluate compliance in that sector or type of employer. Government inspectors and investigators should receive regular training in sector-specific practices in order to rigorously evaluate testimony and facts presented by employees and employers for reasonability. Government enforcement needs to explore substantial regulatory, legislative and strategic changes to enable collection of unpaid wages, damages and penalties. Pilot projects should aggressively test the use of bonds in exploitative industries, the ability of courts and the Department of Labor (DOL) to freeze assets pre-judgment, and wage liens. Public procurement rules should prohibit convicted wage thieves from bidding on public contracts or dispositions at the federal, state and local level, or from receiving public subsidy, with permanent removal from bidding or eligibility lists in cases of egregious wage theft.Download the report here
Parsippany contractor fined $3.2M for underpaying immigrant labor
Parsippany contractor fined $3.2M for underpaying immigrant labor
New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer on Tuesday assessed $3.2 million in fines against a Parsippany-based...
New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer on Tuesday assessed $3.2 million in fines against a Parsippany-based contractor for cheating dozens of workers out of the prevailing wages and benefits they were owed under the New York State Labor Law.
K.S. Contracting Corp. and its owner, Paresh Shah, also will be barred from working on New York City and State contracts for five years.
“With President Trump taking clear aim at immigrants across the country, we need to stand up and protect the foreign-born New Yorkers who keep our city running. Every New Yorker has rights, and my office won’t back down in defending them,” Stringer said. “Contractors might think they can take advantage of immigrants, but today we’re sending a strong message: my office will fight for every worker in New York City. This is about basic fairness and accountability.”
K.S. Contracting was named as one of the worst wage theft violators in New York in a report by the Center for Popular Democracy in 2015. The majority of the workers impacted were immigrants of Latino, South Asian, or West Indian descent.
An Internet search produced two Parsippany addresses for K.S. Contracting, both listing Shah as the owner. The number listed for an office at 342 Parsippany Road has been disconnected. A woman answering a call to the other Parsippany location listed for the company, a residential address at 29 Phillip Drive, said no one by the name Paresh Shah was there, and "no contracting."
Paresh Shah is listed in New Jersey tax records as the owner at 29 Phillip Drive.
According to Stringer's statement announcing the penalties, K.S. Contracting was awarded more than $21 million in contracts by the City Departments of Design and Construction, Parks and Recreation, and Sanitation between 2007 and 2010. Those projects included the Morrisania Health Center in the Bronx, the 122 Community Center in Manhattan, the Barbara S. Kleinman Men’s Residence in Brooklyn, the North Infirmary Command Building on Rikers Island, Bronx River Park, the District 15 Sanitation Garage in Brooklyn, and various city sidewalks in Queens.
The comptroller’s office began investigating the company after an employee filed a complaint with the office in May 2010. The multi-year investigation used subpoenas, video evidence, union records, and city agency data to uncover a kickback scheme that preyed on immigrant workers.
Stringer's statement included a video shot with a hidden camera by a foreman on several of the aforementioned construction jobs. A comptroller's office spokesperson said the foreman, who was cooperating with authorities as a victim of the scheme, is seen handing $4,982 in cash to the K.B. manager in a car and asking the manager to count it. The manager then takes the cash out of an envelope and counts it.
According to the comptroller's office, the cash was the proceeds of paychecks distributed to workers, who then cashed the checks and gave it back to the foreman.
After a four-day administrative trial in May 2016, Stringer found that K.S. Contracting routinely issued paychecks to just half of its workforce and then required those employees to cash the checks and surrender the money to company supervisors. The Comptroller further found that those supervisors would then redistribute the cash to all of the employees on a jobsite, paying them at rates significantly below prevailing wages. Stringer added that the company falsely reported to city agencies that all employees on the job site who received checks were paid the prevailing wage.
Between August 2008 and November 2011, the company cheated at least 36 workers out of $1.7 million in wages and benefits on seven New York City public works projects, stringer said. K.S. Contracting reported that it paid its workers combined wage and benefit rates starting at $50 per hour but actually paid daily cash salaries starting at $90 per day.
The New York City Comptroller’s office enforces state and local laws which require private contractors working on New York City public works projects or those with service contracts with City agencies to pay no less than the prevailing wage or living wage rate to their employees.
When workers are underpaid, the New York City Comptroller’s office works to recoup the amount of the underpayment plus interest.
By William Westhoven
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Black Lives Matter Releases Policy Demands, Includes Reparations And Abolishing The Death Penalty
On Monday, more than 60 organizations associated with the Black Lives Matter movement released a series of policy...
On Monday, more than 60 organizations associated with the Black Lives Matter movement released a series of policy demands, including free access to higher education, reparations, and an end to capital punishment.
According to the New York Times, these demands come on the heels of the second anniversary of Michael Brown’s death and after both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.
“Our grievances and solutions extend beyond the police killing of our people; state violence includes failing schools that criminalize our children, dwindling earning opportunities, wars on our trans and queer family that deny them of their humanity, and so much more,” Montague Simmons of Organization for Black Struggle and the Movement for Black Lives Policy Table, said in a statement. “That’s why we united, with a renewed energy and purpose, to put forth a shared vision of the world we want to live in.”
The plan, titled “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom and Justice,” offers up six core demands and 40 policy priorities, NBC News noted. They include:
Ending the War on Black People: This includes abolishing the death penalty, mass surveillance in communities of color, the privatization of police, violence against all Blacks (including Black trans, queer and gender nonconforming people) and using a past criminal history as a means to seek a job, housing, license and voting rights.
Reparations: To address the past and current harms that slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration have done to the Black community, BLM is seeking reparations for the wealth extracted from our communities, guaranteed livable income and free access and open admissions to public community colleges, universities, and technical schools, to name a few.
Invest-Divest: Instead of federal, state, and local monies being invested into prisons, police, surveillance, and exploitative corporations, BLM would rather see that invested into long-term safety strategies such as education, local restorative justice services, employment programs, and universal health care.
Economic Justice: This is calling for Black communities to have real collective ownership of wealth in the U.S. This could be achieved with restructuring tax codes, creating federal and state job programs that specifically target the most economically marginalized Black people, breaking up large banks and ensuring better protection for workers.
Community Control: This would include the end of the privatization of education and making sure communities have the power to hire and fire officers, determine disciplinary action, control budgets and policies, and subpoena relevant agency information when needed.
Political Power: To ensure that real democracy can be achieved for all Black people, BLM wants for all political prisoners to be released, eliminating Super Pacs that fund candidates, ensuring election protection, early registration at the age of 16, full access to technology and the internet, and increased funding to HBCU’s.
Marbre Stahly-Butts, who is part of the leadership team of the Movement for Black Lives Policy Table, told the Times that neither Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump have truly made strides to address these issues in their prospective campaigns.
“On both sides of aisle, the candidates have really failed to address the demands and the concerns of our people. So this was less about this specific political moment and this election, and more about how do we actually start to plant and cultivate the seeds of transformation of this country that go beyond individual candidates,” she said.
This plan also shows a sign of an evolution for the movement, which has been criticized in the past for not having a clear concise platform of how they want to usher in change. And now as the election continues, it’s about using these ideals to further hold the nation’s politicians accountable, Michaela Brown, communications director of Baltimore Bloc, stressed.
“We seek radical transformation, not reactionary reform. As the 2016 election continues, this platform provides us with a way to intervene with an agenda that resists state and corporate power, an opportunity to implement policies that truly value the safety and humanity of black lives, and an overall means to hold elected leaders accountable,” she said in statement.
We hope all these leaders are paying close attention.
By KELLEE TERRELL
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City to help immigrants seeking deportation reprieves
New York Times - July 17, 2013, by Kirk Semple - New York City plans to spend $18 million over the next two years to...
New York Times - July 17, 2013, by Kirk Semple - New York City plans to spend $18 million over the next two years to help young unauthorized immigrants qualify for a federal program that grants a temporary reprieve from deportation, officials announced on Wednesday.
The money will add 16,000 seats to adult education classes throughout the city, and priority for those slots will be given to immigrants who might qualify for the reprieve.
While more than 20,500 immigrants in New York State have already been granted the reprieve, known as deferred action, city officials have estimated that about 16,000 others in New York City alone would satisfy all the conditions save for the requirement that they have a high school diploma or General Educational Development certificate, or be currently enrolled in school.
The project — the largest investment made by any municipality in the nation to help immigrants obtain the deferral, city officials said — is one of two new immigrant-assistance initiatives that will receive significant injections of public money in the current fiscal year, which began July 1.
The other budget allocation, which the city plans to announce formally on Friday, will pay for a pilot program that will create what immigrants’ advocates say will be the nation’s first public defender system for immigrants facing deportation.
Together, the two programs further cement New York’s reputation as one of the most immigrant-friendly cities in the nation. They also come at a time when a push for comprehensive immigration reform that would include a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants has met stiff resistance among Republicans in the House of Representatives.
In a news conference in City Hall on Wednesday, Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, seemed to allude to sclerotic politics on Capitol Hill, saying the Council’s budget decisions send a message to the rest of the nation “that local government can take action while we wait for comprehensive immigration reform.”
The federal deportation reprieve was announced by the Obama administration in June 2012. To qualify, an applicant must have arrived in the United States before reaching his or her 16th birthday and been younger than 31 as of June 15, 2012, among other requirements. Recipients of the reprieve, which is subject to renewal after two years, are legally allowed to work and, in many states, obtain a driver’s license.
More than 400,500 people across the nation have been granted the deferral; for many others, the educational requirement has been a major hurdle.
For years, adult education programs in the city have been swamped by huge demand yet been hamstrung by financial shortfalls.
Of the $18 million allocation, $13.7 million will be provided to community-based organizations through the Youth and Community Development Department and used for outreach and the increase in seats. The remaining $4.3 million will help expand related education programs offered through the City University of New York, like English for Speakers of Other Languages and General Educational Development.
In recent days, immigrants’ advocates have also been celebrating the City Council’s decision to help pay for another initiative: the allocation of $500,000 in its current budget for a network of legal service providers to represent immigrants facing deportation.
Defendants in immigration court, unlike those in criminal court, have no constitutional right to a court-appointed lawyer. Hampered by language barriers, lack of money or ignorance, most end up trying to fight their deportation alone — almost always with poor outcomes.
According to a recent study, 60 percent of detained immigrants in the New York region did not have counsel at the time their cases were completed. Of those without counsel, only 3 percent won their cases, compared with 18 percent of those with counsel.
Proponents of the program, called the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, said it would cost about $8.7 million to provide legal representation for the 2,800 or so immigrants living in New York State who are detained and face deportation every year. The city allocation, however, will help cover the cost of a pilot program to represent just 135 immigrants. Advocates said that despite its limited reach, the pilot program would give them a chance to test their theories and demonstrate the potential impact of a broader plan.
The program will not only help keep families together, argued Andrew Friedman, executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, an advocacy group that helped to lobby for the financing, but will also create “an innovative model program” for other municipalities to replicate.
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