Middlesex County Decides Not to Honor Federal Detainers from ICE for Some Inmates
The Star-Ledger - July 10, 2014 by Sue Epstein - Middlesex County officials are no longer complying with a federal...
The Star-Ledger - July 10, 2014 by Sue Epstein - Middlesex County officials are no longer complying with a federal request to hold all immigrants suspected of being undocumented in the county jail for an additional 48 hours after their scheduled release.
In a policy change approved by Middlesex County freeholders last week and put into effect Tuesday, the detainee can be freed unless charged with a first- or second-degree crime, is identified as a known gang member and has been subject to a final order of removal by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Thomas Kelso, the Middlesex County counsel, said in a statement that people not meeting the serious offense criteria would continue to be released immediately after meeting the legal obligations.
"The policy was established after extensive review and consideration," Freeholder Director Ronald G. Rios said. "We need to be sensitive to the rights of individuals, but must protect our citizens from those with histories of violent crime. We believe that the policy that has been implemented in Middlesex County strikes a fair balance."
Although immigration rights groups applauded the change in policy, they contended that it did not go far enough.
Karina Wilkinson, co-founder of the Middlesex County Coalition for Immigrant Rights, said she wanted the county to stop honoring all 48-hour courtesy detainer requests from federal immigration authorities for county inmates.
"We are pleased to see Middlesex County moving in the right direction in ending their compliance with ICE detainers," Wilkinson said. "The county could still go further to respect the constitutional rights of everyone."
Wilkinson’s group began discussing the proposed policy change with county officials in December.
FIRST IN N.J.Wilkinson and Emily Tucker, an attorney for the Center for Popular Democracy, an advocacy group, said Middlesex County was the first county in the state to change its policy, joining more than 115 jurisdictions nationwide that have enacted similar changes. And of those 115, Wilkinson said, 90 have refused to honor any ICE detainers.
Tucker said the policy changes came on the heels of several federal court rulings that detainers are not legally binding, and that a federal court decision in Oregon said that honoring the detainers could open the jurisdiction to lawsuits.
"The courts have said ICE shows no probable cause to hold these inmates," Tucker said. "It is not the business of law enforcement to enforce immigration orders, it is the federal government’s job. The counties should not be holding anyone on behalf of ICE without a warrant."
Wilkinson said that in 2012, when a federal program known as Operation Secure Communities began in New Jersey, there were 330 detainers issued for inmates at the Middlesex County jail, making the county third in the state behind Essex and Hudson counties in the number of requests issued.
Tucker said the coalition of organizations that pushed Middlesex County to change its policy is working with Essex and Hudson counties in an effort to reach a similar outcome.
According to the ICE website, when a suspected undocumented immigrant is arrested the FBI forwards the fingerprints to the Department of Homeland Security to check against its immigration databases.
If the check shows that a person is undocumented or otherwise removable because of a criminal conviction, a 48-hour detainer is issued to the local jurisdiction.
Bryan Cox, a spokesman for ICE, said the agency remained "committed to working with our law enforcement partners and making our communities safer by protection public safety and national security, and the integrity of the immigration.
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Diversas organizaciones en el área triestatal se preparan para manifestaciones en apoyo al trabajador inmigrante
Diversas organizaciones en el área triestatal se preparan para manifestaciones en apoyo al trabajador inmigrante
Este lunes, Día internacional del trabajo, se escucharán las voces de miles de inmigrantes indocumentados y sus aliados...
Este lunes, Día internacional del trabajo, se escucharán las voces de miles de inmigrantes indocumentados y sus aliados, que ha 100 días del mandato de Donald Trump, dicen sentirse cansados por el acoso del gobierno. Durante el 1 de mayo también se verán huelgas comerciales, paros laborales y manifestaciones estudiantiles.
Lea el artículo completo aquí.
Panelists talk immigration policy at CNN documentary screening
Panelists talk immigration policy at CNN documentary screening
Ana María Archila, the co-executive director for the Center of Popular Democracy, said immigrants are frightened and...
Ana María Archila, the co-executive director for the Center of Popular Democracy, said immigrants are frightened and anxious just living their lives and going about their daily routines.
Read the full article here.
Fed Language in DNC Platform Could Be Stronger, Activists Say
Fed Language in DNC Platform Could Be Stronger, Activists Say
The Democratic national platform’s language calling for a more diverse Federal Reserve and for the promotion of full...
The Democratic national platform’s language calling for a more diverse Federal Reserve and for the promotion of full employment is historically progressive, but it still could be stronger, some activists say.
Advocates on the “Fed Up” campaign, led by the progressive Center for Popular Democracy, are pleased that the platform — amended in a committee meeting over the weekend — includes language that supports banning commercial bankers from Fed leadership.
But the activists are still hoping for more explicit support bolstering the Fed’s mandate to promote “full employment,” said Jordan Haedtler, Fed Up’s campaign manager.
As it stands, the platform committee adopted an amendment to “protect and defend the Federal Reserve’s independence to carry out the dual mandate assigned to it by Congress — for both full employment and low inflation — against threats from new legislation.”
An amendment promoted by Fed Up would have sketched out a more detailed stance on full employment, but it failed 70-100 at the meeting. That amendment stated: “The Federal Reserve should be a fully public institution that serves the American people and pursues a genuine full employment economy that creates good jobs and rising wages for all.”
Haedtler said the platform’s language about protecting the the Fed from “the threat” of new legislation might actually be counterproductive. His group hopes to lay the groundwork for legislation overhauling the central bank during the next administration. It is likely, however, that the platform writers were referring to legislation from conservatives to abolish the Fed or severely shrink its capabilities.
“I appreciate that full employment is fleetingly mentioned, but the fact is that sound new legislation regarding the Federal Reserve is necessary,” Haedtler told Morning Consult in an interview.
Democrats in Congress have also pushed for more diversity in the Fed’s top layer. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, pressed Fed Chair Janet Yellen during a recent hearing for a commitment to fixing the bank’s diversity problem.
“Diversity is an extremely important goal, and I will do everything I can to advance it,” she told him.
The words “full employment” haven’t appeared in a Democratic National Committee platform since 1988, Haedtler said. But Fed Up hopes to see the language bolstered further in the platform’s preamble.
“This is not as strong as past mentions of full employment in Democratic platforms going back several decades, where the fact that the Federal Reserve has a role in creating full employment is more fleshed out and a plan for how to get there is described,” he said.
The Fed Up activists also want to amend the platform to outline the Fed’s path to becoming a fully public institution.
By TARA JEFFRIES
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In replacing Dudley, NY Fed aims to avoid political pitfalls
In replacing Dudley, NY Fed aims to avoid political pitfalls
Unions and groups advocating for retirees, teachers, housing, and workers' benefits are among those visiting the ornate...
Unions and groups advocating for retirees, teachers, housing, and workers' benefits are among those visiting the ornate conference rooms of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to lobby for a less conventional candidate to serve as its next president.
New York Fed directors leading the search for a successor to chief William Dudley, seen as the second most influential policymaker at the U.S. central bank, invited the guests to last week's meeting to seek their advice. According to attendees and others familiar with the search, the directors are close to a "long list" of candidates and appear set to begin formal interviews within weeks.
Read the full article here.
What the Overworked and Underemployed Have in Common
Huffington Post - October 7, 2014, by Robin Hardman - One morning last week I joined a small gathering in a conference...
Huffington Post - October 7, 2014, by Robin Hardman - One morning last week I joined a small gathering in a conference room at New York City's Baruch College to listen to a line-up of speakers and panelists talk on the subject of "Families and Flexibility." The event was sponsored by Scott Stringer, our NYC Comptroller, who has been promoting city-wide "right to request" legislation. In case you've missed them, right to request laws, currently on the books in many countries around the world and very slowly gaining traction here in the U.S., provide employees with the simple right to request a flexible schedule. Details--including who can ask and for what reasons, and how much leeway employers have in responding-- vary, but laws are already in place in San Francisco and Vermont, and legislation is pending in many other places--including the U.S. Congress.
Hence this event, which gave Comptroller Stringer an opportunity to strut his stuff; featured a closing keynote by Anne-Marie Slaughter, President and CEO of the New America Foundation; and allowed a number of smart policy-makers, advocates, researchers, corporate work-life champions and workers to weigh in with their stories and data. But perhaps the most noticeable aspect of the morning was what I'll call the Great Divide between the two panels that made up the bulk of the agenda.
The first panel featured political scientist Janet Gornick; A Better Balance co-president Dina Bakst; Families and Work Institute's Kelly Sakai-O'Neill, and work-life/flex champions from two accounting firms: Marcee Harris Schwartz of BDO and Barbara Wankoff of KPMG. Moderated by New York Times reporter Rachel Swarns, the panelists conducted an interesting, data-driven discussion about why flexibility matters and the very real problems many professional men and women face achieving any kind of work-life "balance." The ideas and concerns they raised were the important stuff that is often stressed in our national work-life conversation: The business benefits of a more flexible workplace. The negative impact of overwork on both families and society at large. The dark-ages state of parental leave laws in this country, especially in comparison with pretty much every other country in the developed world.
We listened to and discussed these topics for a full hour, grabbed some more coffee, and moved on to the second panel. I wished I'd worn my sneakers: it was a dizzying leap across a conceptual chasm.
The second panel featured A Better Balance's other co-president, Sheery Leiwant, as well as sociologist Ruth Milkman and Carrie Gleason, Director of the Center for Popular Democracy's Fair Workweek Initiative. It also featured a woman named Deena Adams, a single parent who, shortly after receiving a service award for loyalty, lost her job because she couldn't find child care to accommodate a sudden requirement that she start taking on overnight shifts. (A fifth panelist, Carrie Nathan, is a union activist and hourly employee at Macy's, which apparently has an exceptionally supportive system for shift scheduling.)
At this panel, moderated by Times labor reporter, Steven Greenhouse, we heard about the other end of the spectrum. We heard about things not usually talked about in the context of work-life and not talked about enough in any context. In contrast to the (very real) problems of professional workers--so many of whom feel overworked and short on time--we now focused on the growing legions of workers who aspire, most of all, to have a full-time job. The exploitation of the underemployed has become something of a science in recent years, as technology provides elaborate algorithms that can tell employers on a day-to-day--sometimes hour-to-hour--basis exactly how many employees they need on site and how many they can just tell to stay home. Many employers use this hyper-efficiency to move workers about like pieces on a chessboard, expecting them to be on call for the next move, whenever it may come.
Please understand what this means: employees must be ready, sometimes forty hours a week, sometimes 24/7, to drop everything and show up for their minimum wage job. They have to have child care available; they can make no permanent social or vacation plans; they cannot take a class. Generally, all this readiness leads to far less than full-time work and yet by definition also makes it impossible to take a second job. One man quoted in an article by Greenhouse talked about being told in a job interview that he'd have to be on call full-time but would be able to work no more than 29 hours/week. When he objected, the interview was over. Another described asking his employer to schedule his "wildly fluctuating" 25 hours/week at the same time each day so could find a second job--and promptly had his weekly hours cut to 12. A woman commuted an hour to her scheduled shift only to be told to go home (with no pay)--she wasn't needed today.
The overworked, the underworked. The Great Divide. It's odd to wrap the phrase "work-life" around the situations of these two groups of people, yet it does apply to both. Each ultimately comes down to a lack of control over one's own time. Each apparently stems from employers' mistaken belief that providing a modicum of flexibility and predictability is bad for business (as if stressed-out employees and high turnover were good for the bottom line). Each affects more than just the people involved--it affects our families, our friends and our communities.
The good news is that some of the "right to request" existing and pending legislation around the country focuses not just on flexibility but also on predictability. The tools are at hand to make changes that affect men and women on both sides of the chasm. Did I mention that it's National Work and Family Month? Come on, people, let's get going.
Robin Hardman is a writer and work-life expert who works with companies to put together the best possible "great place to work" competition entries and creates compelling, easy-to-read benefits, HR, diversity and general-topic employee communications. Find her and follow her blog at www.robinhardman.com.
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Room for Debate: The Public Pension Problem
Bring Financial Managers in House The New York Times - December 5, 2013, by Connie Razza - This past year, investment...
The New York Times - December 5, 2013, by Connie Razza - This past year, investment management fees on New York City pensions increased 28 percent. Over the past seven years, they have more than doubled to $472.5 million annually. The city pays very high fees even in years when the funds lose value.
Internal control of pension fund assets for public workers will help rebalance a city's relationship with Wall Street.
These fees unduly burden the funds and add to the uncertainty with which our city's retired and current employees face the future. The rapid rise in pension fund fees is just one of many symptoms of our badly broken financial system, which fails to serve the broader economy and promote general prosperity. Instead, it promotes and exacerbates inequality. As part of the New Day New York Coalition, the Center for Popular Democracy has proposed a sweeping solution. New York should create a highly skilled in-house financial management team for pension fund assets. Even with salaries high enough to attract top quality managers, the city would not pay the typical "2 percent of assets under management, plus 20 percent of profits" that hedge funds, private-equity firms and real-estate firms typically charge. The profit motive of in-house managers will be fully aligned with city employees and they will be better situated to ensure that investments are financially responsible, contributing to our broader economy and to the funds' bottom line. The creation of the in-house financial team would save the pension funds hundreds of millions of dollars a year. As significant a change as this would be, it is an idea that the city's former chief investment officer has advocated, and that incoming city comptroller Scott Stringer has expressed interest in. Also, pension funds in Alaska, California, Wisconsin and Ontario, Canada, already do this, to varying degrees. All of these funds also rely on outside managers for some of their investments, but insourcing much of the pension investment management would give the city funds meaningful leverage when working with outside management firms. Building an internal capacity to manage the pension fund assets of city workers is an important step toward rebalancing the city's relationship with Wall Street.
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When Bosses Schedule Hours That Just Don't Work
Gap follows Abercrombie & Fitch, Starbucks and Victoria’s Secret in promising to end on-call scheduling. It took ...
Gap follows Abercrombie & Fitch, Starbucks and Victoria’s Secret in promising to end on-call scheduling. It took strong public and regulatory pressure to get the companies to change, but change they have.
Unfortunately, unpredictable scheduling is still widespread.According to federal data, 66 percent of food service workers, 52 percent of retail workers and 40 percent of janitors and house cleaners have at most a week’s notice of their schedules.
On-call scheduling is but one of many dubious pay and scheduling practices. Workers who show up for a scheduled shift may be sent home without pay if business is slow. Schedules can fluctuate from week to week, making it hard to manage family life or calculate a budget.
Victoria’s Secret engages in still another questionable practice. Salespeople are offered a bonus based on a formula that takes into account sales per hour. But the calculation includes hours when the store is closed — hours spent tidying up, for instance, when there is obviously no chance to make sales. By reducing the sales-per-hour number, this formula can put a bonus out of reach. Victoria’s Secret would not comment on its bonus policy.
The fundamental problem is that as scheduling has become a tool for higher profits, it has also generated unfair practices. Software lets employers calibrate maximum profit at minimum labor cost. Managers are often compensated on the efficiency of their staff. A retail manager’s best employee would not necessarily be the top seller, but rather the one who sells the most at the lowest pay.
Then, too, there is abuse of overtime, in which a company shifts work from hourly workers eligible for time-and-a-half pay to salaried workers who are ineligible for overtime pay. A former salaried executive assistant manager at Walgreens, Caleb Sneeringer, said his hours ballooned to up to 70 a week when the chain stopped scheduling most hourly workers for overtime around 2010. Walgreens says it does not have a no-overtime policy and tries to manage “overtime hours efficiently while providing a high level of customer service.”
A rule recently proposed by the Labor Department would be both fair and efficient. It would make salaried employees eligible for overtime if they make less than $50,440 a year. (The current threshold, which has barely budged since 1975, is $23,660.) Retailers and other low-wage employers strongly oppose the proposal. Meanwhile, bills in Congress and some stateswould curb some of the most disruptive scheduling practices, including on-call shifts or sending workers home early without pay. Approving these bills will require lawmakers to put the interests of workers ahead of their corporate contributors.
Source: New York Times
Clinton Joins Crowd Calling for an Overhaul of Fed Governance
Clinton Joins Crowd Calling for an Overhaul of Fed Governance
Hillary Clinton is the latest voice calling for changes at the Federal Reserve. A spokesman for the front-...
Hillary Clinton is the latest voice calling for changes at the Federal Reserve.
A spokesman for the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination released a statement Thursday saying that the Fed “needs to be more representative of America as a whole” and arguing that “commonsense reforms -- like getting bankers off the boards of regional Federal Reserve banks -- are long overdue.”
The statement, sent by Clinton spokesman Jesse Ferguson and first reported by the Washington Post, comes as Democrats unleash a volley of criticism against the central bank. Earlier on Thursday, lawmakers called for more consideration of African American, Latino and female candidates for top Fed posts in a letter to Chair Janet Yellen. The missive was signed by a majority of the Democratic members of Congress.
Clinton’s position garnered praise from the union-backed Fed Up coalition, which coordinated the congressional letter.
The campaign’s comment also partly echoed a proposal that Fed Up put out last week, in which former Fed economist Andrew Levin suggested structural reforms for the central bank. Levin argued that the Fed should be made a more public institution.
Currently, regional reserve bank boards have nine directors: six are elected by member banks, with three representing commercial banks and three representing the public. The final three directors are appointed by the Board of Governors in Washington, and are also meant to represent the public.
Bank Control
That means two-thirds of the board seats at the 12 regional Fed banks are controlled by commercial banks, Levin wrote, saying that the directors should instead be affiliated with small businesses and non-profit organizations and selected through a “process overseen by the Federal Reserve Board and involving the elected officials in each Fed district.”
“The process should ensure that directors are representative of the public in terms of racial/ethnic and gender diversity and educational background and professional experience,” Levin wrote.
Esther George, president of the Kansas City Fed, said Thursday that “diversity for the Federal Reserve is critical,” and that progress has been made both at the board of directors and at the staff level in making sure the Fed reflects the communities that it serves.
Preserving Independence
Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker pushed back against proposals to make the Fed more public in an article posted Thursday. He said the regional branches’ hybrid governance structure “has come to play an important role in the independence of monetary policy” and “independence allows monetary policy to place greater weight on the long-term benefits of low and stable inflation.”
“The current Fed governance structure may not be ideal,” Lacker wrote. “But until there is a proposal that preserves the monetary policy independence that is so vital to the Fed’s mandate, we should stick to what we have.”
While there have been various Congressional attempts at shaking up Fed structure in recent years, those have made little headway. For instance, Republican Senator Richard Shelby proposed a bill last year that would have tweaked the New York Fed, making its leader a presidential appointee, among other changes, but it never passed.
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has also weighed in on the Fed in recent days. On CNBC last week, Trump said that he’s a “low-interest” person and that he would replace Yellen when her term ends.
By Jeanna Smialek
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Time for a Moratorium on Charter Schools
Al Jazeera America - April 14, 2015, by Amy Dean - Charter schools are everywhere. Not long ago, these publicly funded...
Al Jazeera America - April 14, 2015, by Amy Dean - Charter schools are everywhere. Not long ago, these publicly funded but privately run institutions were a relative rarity. Those that existed served mostly as experimental academies whose successful lessons could be applied elsewhere in their host school districts. But in the last 15 years, swaths of the U.S. public education system have been turned over to charters. In fact, they are being used as a means to crush teachers’ unions and to pursue high-stakes testing.
Charter advocates justify this ascent by promising an antidote to the disappointing outcomes of traditional public schools in segregated and underfunded urban districts. But the research is in: Charter schools have failed to deliver on their promises.
It is time lawmakers freeze their growth and consider how to provide the best education possible for all students.
Underwhelming performance
There are recent precedents for a moratorium on charter schools. Philadelphia, which issued dozens of charter licenses before 2008, did not allow any new ones from 2008 to 2015. The Chicago School District declared a freeze on charters for the 2015–16 school year. Connecticut and Delaware are considering similar actions. Other school boards and states should follow suit.
As a bevy of recent studies prove, charter schools are not substantially outperforming neighborhood public schools. In Arizona, for example, “on average, charter schools in Arizona do no better, and sometimes worse, than the traditional public schools” according to a study by the Brookings Institution. A similar study in Ohio showed that public schools were producing better results than their charter peers in most parts of the state. In Illinois the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity found that Chicago’s charter schools are “less likely to be racially or ethnically diverse” than and “consistently underperform” their public school peers.
That charter schools are not doing better than traditional public schools is particularly disturbing, since they have a host of advantages. Notably, many charters cherry-pick their students. A 2013 study by Reuters found that charter schools employ complicated screening mechanisms to admit only students who are most likely to succeed. This ensures that students from deeply impoverished families or households where English is not spoken at home are less likely to gain admission. These methods include using English-only documents, demanding proof of citizenship (which is illegal) and narrowing application windows to a few hours.
Charters also regulate the composition of their student bodies through expulsions. In 2014 the Chicago School District reported that public schools expelled 182 students out of 353,000. By contrast, charter schools booted 307 students out of 50,000. The expelled students end up back in the public schools, which become the institution of last resort. Charter schools should in theory register superior test scores, since they are not serving some of the highest-need students. Yet that has not been the case on the whole.
Charters have fallen short in terms of transparency and accountability too. A 2010 review from the Philadelphia controller’s office found that the city’s charter schools had little oversight from the understaffed and underfunded school district. Numerous charter operators have been charged with corruption and misuse of funds.
A national moratorium on charter schools would stop the hemorrhaging of funds from traditional public schools.
A 2014 report by two anti-education-privatization organizations, the Center for Popular Democracy and Integrity in Education, found $136 million in fraud and abuse in 15 states. A follow-up study (PDF) in Pennsylvania revealed “charter school officials have defrauded at least $30 million intended for Pennsylvania schoolchildren since 1997.” Some of the questionable dealings may not be illegal because of the intricacies of state laws, but there is little doubt that public money is being wasted.
A recent review of charter school scandals in Florida and Michigan by The Washington Post listed numerous cases of real estate flipping, in which charter schools were used as vehicles for exorbitant profits. Michigan’s largest charter operator, National Heritage Academies gets a 16 percent return on its investment in rent from the state — nearly twice what most commercial properties receive.
A nationwide moratorium
Chicago and Philadelphia provide good examples for setting moratoriums on charter schools, but the freeze has been limited in both cities. Philadelphia’s School Reform Commission did not approve a new charter school in the last seven years. But the number of students enrolled at the existing charters continued to grow, doubling from 2007 to 2015. This year the commission approved five new charters — a regrettable reversal of the moratorium.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has declared that no new charter schools will be funded during the 2015–16 year. However, there is good reason to believe that he is simply playing politics and that he will not extend the moratorium. He faced a tough re-election battle, and the temporary halt was seen as an attempt to lure supporters of public education back into his camp. His poll numbers plunged in 2013 when he closed 50 neighborhood public schools, mostly in black and Hispanic neighborhoods that turned out for him in the 2011 election. His attempts to use the moratorium to appeal to disaffected voters shows that black and Latino parents, whom advocates of the charter industry insist want more charter schools, are hardly as enamored with charters as previously thought.
Nationwide, the expansion of charter schools continues unabated. Charter advocates report that 500 new charter schools opened during the 2014–15 school year, enrolling 348,000 students. One in 20 American students is enrolled in a charter school.
It is time for this to stop.
Charter advocates claim that they are data-driven technicians who pay attention to evidence of what works. But research does not support their preferred education policies. A national moratorium on charter schools would stop the hemorrhaging of funds from traditional public schools. It would also allow time to address the corruption that has plagued the charter industry. This would create an opportunity for some reflection on what actually works best for educating our children.
Amy B. Dean is a fellow of the Century Foundation and a principal of ABD Ventures, a consulting firm that works to develop innovative strategies for organizations devoted to social change. She is a co-author, with David Reynolds, of “A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement.”
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.
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