CPD IN THE NEWS

Wall Street Journal - July 14, 2014, by Alan Zibel - Citigroup’s $7 billion settlement with the Justice Department over the sale of flawed mortgage securities includes an agreement by the bank to provide $820 million worth of loan forgiveness and other assistance, plus nearly $300 million in refinancing. The money is also earmarked to help with down payments, donations to community groups and financing for rental housing.

These requirements, outlined in a 15-page appendix to the agreement, provide more specificity for consumer assistance than a $25 billion 2012 state/federal settlement with Citigroup and four other banks over mortgage-servicing problems. They also are more detailed than a November 2013 settlement with J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. over similar flawed mortgage securities sold to investors.

At a press conference in Washington on Monday, Associate Attorney General Tony West said the department aimed to improve on previous settlements by establishing an “an innovative consumer relief menu—one that not only includes the principal reductions and loan modifications we’ve built into previous resolutions, but also new, consumer-friendly measures.”

The Citigroup settlement, unlike previous pacts, directs the bank to provide half of its loan assistance to particularly hard-hit parts of the country. It also mandates that borrowers whose loan balances are cut won’t remain “underwater” —or owe more on their homes than their properties are worth.

The J.P. Morgan settlement addresses similar issues, but in a less targeted way. It gave the bank a bonus for providing aid to hard-hit areas, but set no specific requirement. In addition, the J.P. Morgan settlement encourages loan write-downs but does not specify how much of a borrower’s debt must be forgiven. The Citigroup settlement contains $180 million in financing for affordable rental housing—a provision not included in other settlements.

“This settlement is far more nuanced than previous settlements with respect to consumer relief,” said Andrew Jakabovics, senior director for policy development and research Enterprise Community Partners, a large affordable-housing nonprofit group.  The pact, he said, “reflects many of the best practices we’ve seen develop with respect to creating sustainable loan modifications.”

A Justice Department official said the consumer-assistance portion of the Citigroup settlement reflects refinements to the government’s thinking after previous settlements. In addition, the official said the smaller size of Citigroup’s mortgage-lending portfolio caused the government to consider additional avenues for relief because the bank had fewer loans to modify.

There has been tension between the Obama administration and liberal activist groups over efforts to resolve cases related to banks’ mortgage-crisis conduct.

Consumer groups have been unhappy with previous settlements of mortgage-related cases. For example, the 2012 mortgage-servicing settlement allowed banks to receive credit for short sales, in which a bank agrees to allow the sale of a property with a mortgage worth more than the home’s value, and for granting “deeds in lieu of foreclosure,” where a homeowner voluntary surrenders the home.

Some activists are still skeptical of the government’s settlements with the financial industry. Kevin Whelan, national campaign director for the Home Defenders League, an activist group representing homeowners, said there’s been no noticeable impact from last fall’s J.P. Morgan settlement.

“We haven’t seen any evidence that they’ve done anything at all,” Mr. Whelan said.

No statistics on the J.P. Morgan settlement have been released. A J.P. Morgan spokeswoman declined comment.

Joseph Smith, a former North Carolina banking regulator, is serving as the independent monitor overseeing the J.P. Morgan settlement and is expected to release a report on its progress in the coming weeks.

Thomas Perrelli, a former Justice Department official who helped broker the 2012 mortgage settlement, will serve as the monitor of the Citigroup agreement. Mr. Perrelli is now at the law firm Jenner & Block in Washington.

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For more than two decades, workers in the retail and restaurant industries have struggled to balance family life and other obligations with jobs that demand they be “on call.” Now, under legal pressure and in a tightening labor market, some employers are changing their approach.

On Tuesday, the New York Attorney General’s office announced that six retailers – Aeropostale, Carter’s, David’s Tea, Disney, PacSun, and Zumiez – have agreed to end “on-call” scheduling. From now on, their employees will not need to check each day whether they should come to work, nor do they risk being sent home early without pay when the store is quiet. Four of the companies also committed to giving employees their schedules one week in advance.

Ending “on-call” scheduling will make a big difference for employees, increasing the predictability of work schedules and making it easier to plan other activities. But they aren’t the only ones who will benefit from the change, observers say: It could also bring long-term benefits for businesses and society.

“It’s a pretty significant move,” Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy, tells The Christian Science Monitor in a phone interview. “Retail companies ... are really starting to recognize that they need to invest in their workforce.”

In the past, workers’ wages were considered a fixed cost, wrote Robert Reich, who served as Labor secretary during Bill Clinton’s presidency and is now a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. In the 1990s, however, wages became a variable cost: Many businesses used on-call scheduling to trim costs by having as few workers as possible. Some even deployed software systems that highlighted the times when employees were least needed.

That kind of scheduling takes a substantial toll on workers, explains Lonnie Golden, a professor of economics and labor-employment relations at Penn State University-Abington, in a phone interview with the Monitor. Professor Golden was the primary author of an April report for the Economic Policy Institute about the consequences of irregular work scheduling.

Uncertain hours make it hard for workers to plan their daily lives, says Golden. Holding down a second job becomes more difficult, uncertain paychecks mean incomes often fall short, and childcare is an increased challenge.

These employees are most likely to experience “work-life conflict” and be stressed at work, Golden notes.

That also puts businesses with “on-call” scheduling on the wrong side of some state and federal labor laws. In April, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and the attorneys general of seven other states and the District of Columbia sent a letter to the six retailers asking them to end the practice, as they have now agreed to do.

Ms. Gleason points to that April letter and other, similar investigations as the "single most influential factor" in moving businesses away from these scheduling practices. Seven other businesses announced that they would end "on-call" scheduling in 2015.

But with a new presidential administration kicking off in a few weeks, the future of these investigations is uncertain.

“The incoming Labor Secretary is [at] the complete opposite end of the spectrum,” Gleason says, making it “incumbent now on states” to continue pushing for these standards.

Worker-friendly policies are becoming bipartisan causes in many states, the Monitor’s Schuyler Velasco wrote in October – and New York is one of several states working toward a legislative ban on “on-call” scheduling. In September, Seattle's city council unanimously passed a “secure scheduling” law, which requires employers to schedule their workers 14 days in advance, and includes a "right to rest" provision that allows workers to decline closing and opening shifts that are less than 10 hours apart.

Businesses themselves may have incentives to end on-call scheduling. In a tightening labor market, employers want to hang on to their workers, notes Golden, who is also a senior research analyst at the Project for Middle Class Renewal at the University of Illinois. And businesses that offer better hours – and more consistent hours – are more appealing to workers, leading to better retention.

The more businesses sign on to these measures, the more workers’ wages are taken out of the cost-cutting equation. More than 300,000 workers have been impacted so far, says Gleason.

Greater certainty about schedules has benefits beyond individual workers, she says. If people know when they’re working, they can also schedule time to be with their children, or attend college and grad school classes.

“Employees are going to be better off, and maybe even society,” she says.

By Ellen Powell

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WASHINGTON — As calls of “Trumpcare kills” and “health care is a human right” echoed through the halls of Capitol office buildings Monday, Lauren Klinkhamer stood quietly in Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake’s office and told staffers, “I don’t want to die.”

The Tucson resident fears she would be among the 22 million Americans, and as many as 400,000 Arizonans, who would lose health care under a bill the Senate is considering to replace the Affordable Care Act. For Klinkhamer, who said she suffers from 16 chronic conditions, losing her coverage would be a death sentence.

Read the full article here.

The Washington Post - December 6, 2013, by Valerie Strauss - A coalition of education, labor, civic and civil rights organizations, led by the American Federation of Teachers, is staging a “National Day of Action” on Monday with dozens of coordinated events in cities across the country that are aimed at building a national movement to fight corporate-influenced school reform and offer alternative ways to improve public education. The AFT is buying $1.2 million in radio, print and online ads to get out the message.

Protests have been building this year in different parts of the country against the education reform movement that is dominated by the use of standardized test scores as the chief “accountability” metric and school “choice” that has led to the growing privatization of public schools. The AFT says that Monday will be the first time so many events — protest marches, news conferences, and town halls scheduled in 60 cities including Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, Austin, Houston and other Texas cities, Boise, Los Angeles and several locations in Florida — have been coordinated to send a message to policymakers that school reform should be focused not on closing schools, punishing teachers and deluging kids with tests but on providing teachers and students with the resources they need to teach and learn.

“Teachers, parents, students and community members are banding together to demand a new direction for public education,” AFT President Randi Weingarten said. “In some ways, this Day of Action is years in the making. Parents, students, teachers and community members have been coming together in places like Chicago, Philadelphia and New York to call out what’s not working and create solutions that do. Text-fixation, austerity, privatization, division, competition are not working for our students – as we saw in the PISA results this week. Our schools need evidence-based, community-based solutions like early childhood education, wraparound services, professional autonomy and development, parent voices and project-based learning. That’s what this Day of Action is about. That’s what reclaiming the promise is about. These are our schools and they need our solutions.”

Dozens of organizations representing parents, educators, clergy, civil rights activists, and community groups are participating in the event, which is being sponsored nationally by these groups:  Alliance for Educational Justice,  American Federation of Teachers, Annenberg Institute for School Reform, Dignity in Schools Coalition, Gamaliel Network, Journey for Justice Alliance, Leadership Center for the Common Good, League of United Latin American Citizens, National Education Association, National Opportunity to Learn Campaign and the Service Employees International Union.

In October, a number of organizations came together to come up with a strategy to build a national movement around shared principles, which you can read find here. Among the principles:

Public schools are public institutions.

Our school districts should be committed to providing all children with the opportunity to attend a quality public school in their community. The corporate model of school reform seeks to turn public schools over to private managers and encourages competition — as opposed to collaboration — between schools and teachers. These strategies take away the public’s right to have a voice in their schools, and inherently create winners and losers among both schools and students. Our most vulnerable children become collateral damage in these reforms. We will not accept that …

Our voices matter.

Those closest to the education process — teachers, administrators, school staff, students and their parents and communities — must have a voice in education policy and practice. Our schools and districts should be guided by them, not by corporate executives, entrepreneurs or philanthropists. Top-down interventions rarely address the real needs of schools or students …

Strong public schools create strong communities.

Schools are community institutions as well as centers of learning. While education alone cannot eradicate poverty, schools can help to coordinate the supports and services their students and families need to thrive. Corporate reform strategies ignore the challenges that students bring with them to school each day, and view schools as separate and autonomous from the communities in which they sit.

• “Community Schools” that provide supports and services for students and their families, such as basic healthcare and dental care, mentoring programs, English language classes and more, help strengthen whole communities as well as individual students …

Assessments should be used to improve instruction.

Assessments are critical tools to guide teachers in improving their lesson plans and framing their instruction to meet the needs of individual students. We support accountability. But standardized assessments are misused when teachers are fired, schools are closed and students are penalized based on a single set of scores. Excessive high-stakes testing takes away valuable instructional time and narrows the curriculum — with the greatest impact on our most vulnerable students.

Quality teaching must be delivered by committed, respected and supported educators.

Today’s corporate reformers have launched a war on teachers. We believe that teachers should be honored. Teaching is a career, not a temporary stop on the way to one. Our teachers should be well-trained and supported. They should be given the opportunity to assume leadership roles in their schools. Highly qualified teachers and school staff are our schools’ greatest assets. Let’s treat them that way …

Schools must be welcoming and respectful places for all.

Schools should be welcoming and inclusive. Students, parents, educators and community residents should feel that their cultures and contributions are respected and valued. Schools that push out the most vulnerable students and treat parents as intruders cannot succeed in creating a strong learning environment. Respectful schools are better places to both work and learn …

Our schools must be fully funded for success and equity.

More than 50 years ago, in Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court acknowledged that African-American students were being denied their constitutional right to an integrated and equitable public education. We have not come far enough. Today our schools remain segregated and unequal. When we shortchange some students, we shortchange our nation as a whole. It is time to fund public schools for success and equity, for we are destined to hand off the future of our nation to all our young people.

• We must end the practice of funding our schools based on local property wealth. Only when we take responsibility for all our schools, and all our children, will schools succeed for all our society …

The events planned for Monday’s National Day of Action include a town hall in Washington, D.C., at which teachers and parents will develop a community-driven vision for public schools, starting at 6 p.m. at Eastern High School.  In New York City, union, community and youth partners fighting to win universal full-day prekindergarten will host a rally marking the start of a joint labor-community campaign to support new education initiatives as part of a “new day for public education in New York City” under Mayor-Elect Bill de Blasio.

In Houston, union and community partners will hold a news conference and rally outside the school board offices, where they will call for an end to an overreliance on tests and for fair teacher evaluations. In Chicago, organized parents, teachers and youths will hold a news conference at City Hall and a march to the headquarters of corporate agents such as Loop Capital to demand equitable funding and a public voice in education. In Boise, Idaho, parents, teachers and several community organizations will gather around the state Capitol to support school funding for Idaho public schools, which have some of the lowest state funding in the country.

Here’s how an action in Philadelphia is described on the event list:

A powerful contingent of community and youth groups, parents and labor unions will rally outside Gov. Tom Corbett’s Philadelphia office in coordination with partners in Pittsburgh, followed by a march to the corporate office of Loop Capital, an Illinois bank that has contributed to the privatizing of schools in Chicago and handed out bad interest loans that have crippled Philadelphia’s school system. The union-community alliance is fighting to restore statewide education funding, establish a new equitable education funding formula in 2014, and demand that Loop Capital pay back the bad loans.

The sponsors are the National Day of Action are planning more action in the spring.

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