CPD IN THE NEWS

St. Louis Public Radio - March 5, 2015, by Maria Altman - What recovery? That was the question being asked Thursday by a small group of activists outside the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

About a dozen protesters called on the Fed to focus on unemployment, especially among minorities, rather than on keeping inflation rates low. They said if the Federal Open Market Committee raises the interest rate this year, as anticipated, it would likely mean fewer jobs.

"We’re calling on the Fed to do the right thing by most people, because the people they’re helping by changing the policy is a very small minority people and a very influential and affluent group of people," said Derek Laney of Missourians for Reform and Empowerment.

The protest was one of several held at Federal Reserve Banks around the country to highlight a new report by the Center for Popular Democracy and the Economic Policy Institute. The report calls on the Fed to focus on “full unemployment,” and highlights disparities between white and minority unemployment levels.

In Missouri last year the unemployment rate for African-Americans was 14.4 percent, while the rate for whites was just 5.1 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Several of the protesters, who represented a variety of local groups, including MORE, the Organization for Black Struggle, Veterans for Peace, Pro-Vote and Young activists United STL, had personal stories of being out of work and struggling.

Reginald Rounds with MORE said he had recently gotten a bachelor’s degree but still couldn’t find work.

"There is no recovery in the community in which I live," said Rounds. "I talked to many people in different organizations and churches throughout the city as we worked on the Don’t Shoot Coalition. It’s my personal belief that a lot of things that happened in Ferguson just boiled over from all the tensions of unemployment, job creation, housing and our educational system."

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis said in an emailed statement that officials reached out to protesters on Wednesday and asked them to meet to discuss the report. 

"The Fed has a dual mandate to keep inflation low and stable and to foster maximum sustainable employment. It takes these responsibilities very seriously," said Karen Branding, senior vice president of public affairs, in the statement.

Washington University economist Jennifer Dlugosz said the Fed has good reason not to focus too tightly on lowering unemployment levels.

"We know from macroeconomics that if the Fed tries to push the rate of unemployment below the natural rate, which people think is 5.5 percent, that it wouldn’t work and that it would just accelerate inflation," she said.

Dlugosz, who previously worked for the Fed’s Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., said monetary policy is not the right tool to address unemployment disparity. Instead, she said, targeting labor market and education policies to create more equality would likely have better results.

The report also took aim at the Fed’s transparency, especially in choosing the board of directors for each of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks. The protesters argued too many corporate and bank executives take those positions, including in the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’ board of directors.

"It’s basically bankers, and that’s in the charter, and there’s whole bunch of other folks who could be from labor and working people, but are instead from big corporations," said Jeff Ordower of MORE.

The board of directors in each of the Federal Reserve districts is responsible for choosing the president of the Reserve Banks. Those presidents rotate onto the Federal Open Market Committee, which meets eight times a year and decides the nation’s monetary policy. (Learn more about how it all works here on the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis' website.)

In her statement, Branding said the Fed was designed by Congress to “represent the voice of Main St."

"At the St. Louis Fed we have significant dialogue with business leaders, community development organizations, educators and the public,” she wrote. “We have a diverse board of directors who are familiar with economic and credit conditions in the district.”

Professor Dlugosz said the make-up of the boards is somewhat limited by statute. Each district’s community bank members choose three bankers to sit on the board and three non-bankers. The other three directors are chosen by the Fed’s Board of Governors in Washington, D.C, and are supposed to represent a mix of labor, agriculture, industry, and consumers.

Dlugosz said the last group, known as “Class C,” is the most likely group to represent the interests of the public, since they’re appointed by the Board of Governors.

"That’s really, I’m guessing, the main place where you’re going to see heads of labor unions or consumer advocates. If they’re getting on there, I imagine it’s the Board that’s electing them," she said. "I don’t know if that’s changed over time, but one would hope that they’re keeping an eye on it."

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Vivelo Hoy - September 17, 2014, by Jaime Reyes - Chicago se unió a las ciudades de los Angeles y Nueva York en el programa “Cities for Citizenship” para que más inmigrantes legales se hagan ciudadanos.

El programa, que además ayudará a inmigrantes con micropréstamos, servicios financieros y legales, será financiado por la corporación Citigroup, con más de $1 millón, y será coordinado por las organizaciones no lucrativas Center for Popular Democracy y National Partnership for New Americans.

Según un comunicado del municipio de Chicago, en Estados Unidos hay más de 8.8 millones de residentes legales, quienes son elegibles para ser ciudadanos.

“Los inmigrantes que se naturalizan hacen grandes contribuciones a nuestras comunidades, ciudades y país y nos conviene colectivamente promover la ciudadanía”, indicó el alcalde de Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, junto a los alcaldes Eric Garcetti, de los Angeles y Bill de Blasio, de Nueva York

Para leer más de nuestra cobertura sobre inmigrantes, visite este enlace.

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A leading progressive activist with Lou Gehrig’s disease appealed to Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) to reconsider his support for the Republican tax bill during a flight to Phoenix on Thursday.

“I need you to make your vote match your principles, senator. And for the rest of your life, you will be proud if you vote this bill down,” said Ady Barkan, founding director of the Fed Up campaign, a group backed by the Center for Popular Democracy that pushes the Federal Reserve to set monetary policy that favors workers.

Read the full article here.

But six months later, the Times reported that Starbucks had not entirely stamped out clopening. And baristas frothing lattes aren’t the only ones who struggle with a very different meaning of the phrase “work-life balance.” Millions of people across the U.S. have to deal with erratic work schedules and/or on-call shifts — at least 17 percent of the workforce, according to an estimate from liberal think tank Economic Policy Institute. Further, EPI found that these scheduling practices are most likely to be felt by low-income workers.

On the heels of several minimum wage increase victories, advocates are also pushing the issue of unstable workweeks as the next big legislative fight in reducing worker inequality. Over the last year, legislation about employee scheduling has been introduced all over the country, in cities — including Minneapolis, Washington, D.C. and San Francisco — and 10 different states, which would restrict or banish policies subjecting workers to uncompensated on-call scheduling, shift changes with less than a week’s notice and limitations on swapping work hours.

The fight for such change has been recently flared in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where a bill introduced in June, the Fair Workweek Act, would have done all of that — plus added additional regulations like allowing part-time employees to accrue 56 hours of paid sick leave a year. Throughout the summer, debate surrounding the bill grew so heated that detractors leaked emails showing city councilors discussing the bill’s language with pro-worker organizers, as if the correspondence had been evidence of a Benghazi-level cover-up and collusion.

Albuquerque ranks 99th out of the top 100 largest metropolitan areas in terms of recovery from the recession. Its 6.8 percent unemployment rate is a point and a half worse than the national average, and there were some 30,000 fewer jobs in the area than in 2008, according to a Brookings analysis that said that Albuquerque was perhaps the only metro enduring a double-dip recession as of last year.

Business interests in the city have argued that the tenets of the Fair Workweek Act would be especially damaging in this fragile economic climate. “The real misunderstanding is not the plight of low-wage workers, but the economics of job creation,” says Carlo Lucero, a vice chair of the Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce. “Things like paying … if a shift is eliminated, those are costs that are not affordable.”

To hear it from local business owners, they’re the ones trying to create jobs, and yet, simultaneously being dinged with regulation on top of regulation — from minimum wage increases (passed by ballot initiative in 2012) to requirements of the Affordable Care Act to changes to the state-run employment insurance program. “We no longer control the wage we pay and we no longer control the healthcare benefits we pay, so one of the last areas of control is our work schedules,” says Lucero. Further, he adds, “This is the worst bill in the history of our Chamber.”

But employees in the service, restaurant and retail industries say irregular scheduling practices are one reason why there are 6.5 million “involuntary part-time” workers nationwide who are unable to accumulate the amount of hours they want. Take the experience of Kris Buchmann, for example. When she worked at American Eagle in Albuquerque a few years ago, she was assigned to only one regular shift — along with up to four on-call shifts per week from 6 to 10 o’clock at night. Each day, she’d be expected to call in an hour beforehand to find out if she was working or not.

“Whether on-call workers would be necessary was directly tied to the sales of the day,” says Buchmann, who now works in the beauty industry and is an organizer for OLÉ, one of the main groups campaigning for the Fair Workweek Act in Albuquerque. Only if the store looked like it would exceed sales goals for the day would the on-call workers be brought in. Otherwise, they’d get no compensation. And without the semblance of workweek normalcy, planning for childcare or school became nearly impossible.

Later, when Buchmann served as manager of a New York & Company store, she had to institute on-call scheduling. From the management’s perspective, the staffing tactic was built on the “assumption that some of these people were going to quit.” But Buchmann found irony in the scenario: By hiring twice the number of workers as shifts available, it simply encouraged more people to quit. “It becomes this weird catch-22 where nobody ever becomes invested in the job, so you don’t have to worry about giving people raises or benefits.”

Advocates for fair workweeks point to employers like Costco and Trader Joe’s as examples of worker-friendly scheduling that can be enacted by chains. It appears that the public in Albuquerque agrees this should be the norm, at least according to one pollconducted in May that found a majority of citizens in favor of the main tenets of the Fair Workweek Act.

“It’s all well and good to have a stable, hourly wage, but if you can’t get enough hours to live on, that’s not helpful,” says Rachel Deutsch, a senior staff attorney for worker justice at the Center for Popular Democracy, which has been advocating in Albuquerque and nationwide on the topic.

In San Francisco, the Retail Workers Bill of Rights took effect last month — the first major movement from a municipality. But national interest continues to grow, as evidenced by the Senator Elizabeth Warren-championed Schedules That Work Act.

In Albuquerque, the Fair Workweek Act was withdrawn this month, after Mayor Richard Berry publicly guaranteed he’d veto it. “We made it very clear from the get-go that we were going to sponsor amendments,” says City Councilor Klarissa Peña, a co-sponsor of the bill. She says that there were provisions of the act — like paying idle employees for their time — that never sat well with her, but without the opportunity to tweak its language now, the Mayor’s declaration muzzled the opportunity for a compromise. “It cut us off at the knees,” Peña says.

Now, both sides expect the fight to culminate in a ballot initiative in 2016 — a path that will not allow room for amendments. Both the Chamber of Commerce and pro-worker groups concur that this summer’s debate was the opening salvo in a prolonged fight. Don’t be surprised if you see that battle coming to a city near you.

“Let’s say you get a minimum wage in one place,” Deutsch says, “this is the next step to address growing income inequality.”

The Equity Factor is made possible with the support of the Surdna Foundation.

Source: Next City