How Obama Can Help New York Immigrants Before Leaving Office
How Obama Can Help New York Immigrants Before Leaving Office
Barack Obama may have given his farewell address, but he still has work to do. In his speech, the president rightly...
Barack Obama may have given his farewell address, but he still has work to do. In his speech, the president rightly celebrated America’s history of welcoming immigrants and their contributions to our country. But Mr. Obama’s legacy on immigration is mixed. He has both deported more people than any prior president and acted in America’s best traditions by letting the Dreamers - undocumented youth brought to the United States as children – emerge from the shadows. There is one final step that President Obama can, and should, take to cement his legacy on the side of history we know is in his heart.
Most immigrant families in the United States are mixed status, meaning most have children who are citizens and immigrant parents, including Legal Permanent Residents (LPRs). The incoming administration’s promise to deport 2-3 million people with legal infractions threatens to rip these American families apart, because the threshold for deporting legal permanent residents is so low. Experts argue that this 2-3 million number cannot be reached without deporting people for minor offenses, such as traffic tickets. This is why I recently joined 60 local elected officials from across the country in asking President Obama to grant a blanket pardon to legal immigrants who have minor infractions and pose no threat to the country. He can prevent the breakup of these American families.
Pardoning this group of immigrants fits with the president’s recent actions on criminal justice and immigration. His clemency initiative and Deferred Arrival for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program seek to fix the broken criminal justice and immigrant systems that harm American families.
Having already designated Legal Permanent Residents with minor convictions as low priorities for deportation, President Obama could protect these American families further with a presidential pardon.
Some will object, arguing that America is a country of law and order. We agree, and support the deportation of those posing a risk to our community. We also support the American belief that punishment should fit the crime. Someone who had a minor infraction such as shoplifting or excessive traffic violations as a teenager could be eligible for deportation 20 years later as a responsible adult with children who are citizens. These deportations make no sense, and hurt families and children without enhancing the wellbeing of the country.
The group making this request, Local Progress, is composed of local elected officials that know, work with, live in, represent, and are part immigrant communities. We know that deportations cripple families and harm neighborhoods and the economy. We also know that the American Dream lives in our communities and that the country benefits from these newcomers and their children. Pardoning this group would prevent the unnecessary breakup of our American families, and allow parents to stay where they belong, raising their children in the communities they have helped build.
Watching President Obama’s farewell speech, I could not help but think about the many families in my Brooklyn district that have lost a family member to deportation. The effects are harsh. When a father gets deported, the family loses income and can lose their apartment. The education of children can be disrupted, and those remaining long to be with their missing family member. For the children – citizens, immigrants, or both – it is a hurt that does not go away. It is a step the U.S. government should not take lightly, or for symbolic political reasons.
I stand with my fellow elected officials to ask President Obama to grant these pardons. I also call on my fellow New Yorkers to call the president’s office and tell him to grant clemency to the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who stand to lose under President Trump. Before he leaves office, President Obama can help cement his legacy with such a pardon. He has the power, and should use it, as other presidents have done in the past. There is still time.
By Carlos Menchaca
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The Criminalized Majority
“Everyone should go to jail, say, once every ten years,” opined novelist and poet Jesse Ball in a recent LA Times...
“Everyone should go to jail, say, once every ten years,” opined novelist and poet Jesse Ball in a recent LA Times article. It may seem like Swiftian satire, but Ball’s proposal is earnest. Addressed “to a nation of jailers,” he argues that a brief but regular stint in jail would serve as the necessary correction to make such institutions more livable–and perhaps less common. “Just think,” he writes, “if everyone in the United States were to become, within a 10-year period, familiar with what it is like to be incarcerated, is there any question that the quality of our prisons would improve?”
Read the full article here.
U.S Workers say the economy needs more support
BetaWired - November 15, 2014 - Jean Andre an American activist decided to visit the Federal Reserve Board’s...
BetaWired - November 15, 2014 - Jean Andre an American activist decided to visit the Federal Reserve Board’s headquarters on Friday to express his concerns about getting a decent job. Janet L. Yellen, the Fed’s chairwoman, agreed to meet him together with about 30 workers concerning the plight of Americans searching for work and struggling to make a living.
Accompanied by Fed’s board of governors officials; Stanley Fischer, the vice chairman; Lael Brainard; and Jerome H. Powell, the jobless Americans had a chance to express their views for about an hour.
Ady Barkan, a lawyer with the Center for Popular Democracy, an advocacy group based in New York that orchestrated the meeting said “The Federal Reserve is too important of an institution to be insulated from the voices and perspectives of working families, we think that the Fed needs to listen more and be more responsive, and we’re very grateful for this first opportunity.”
The Fed declined to comment, citing a policy of silence about private meetings but the workers described what they said in the meeting that was closed to the media. Ady Barkan’s group is campaigning for the Fed to carry on with its stimulus program, citing the high level of unemployment, particularly in minority communities, and the slow pace of wage growth. The group further argued that the Fed could help drive wages up by keeping interest rates low.
According to Josh Bivens, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group, “monetary policy would be “the single most important determinant of wage growth” and that he was glad to see workers recognize the Fed’s importance. A conservative group, American Principles in Action, criticized the meeting as “highly political” and inappropriate expressing that it would seek a related meeting to share its view that the Fed’s stimulus campaign is damaging the economy.
The labor and community groups at the meeting wore green T-shirts that said “What Recovery?” on the front, with a chart demonstrating meager wage gains on the back. They also compelled Yellen to change the way the Fed chooses the presidents of its regional banks.
On Thursday, The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas stated that its president, Richard W. Fisher, would step down on March 19 2015. Furthermore, Charles I. Plosser, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, plans to retire at the beginning of March.
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New York's vote to curb stop-and-frisk is another win for civil rights
The Guardian - June 27, 2013, by Brittny Saunders - New York City Council passed two bills designed to guarantee safety...
The Guardian - June 27, 2013, by Brittny Saunders - New York City Council passed two bills designed to guarantee safety and respect for all New Yorkers. The measures were championed by Communities United for Police Reform, a broad coalition of city groups, and will strengthen the existing ban on police profiling and establish independent oversight of the city's police department.
Today is a new day for New York City. The move reflects a growing alarm over NYPD policies and practices that violate the rights of thousands of New Yorkers and undermine police-community relationships – practices such as the discriminatory use of stop-and-frisk that waste valuable public dollars, while producing no measurable impact on public safety.
Criticism is mounting, not only in the council, but also in federal court, where the legality of these practices is being questioned. Those same questions are echoed in the homes of regular New Yorkers – a majority of whom disapprove of stop-and-frisk and two-thirds of whom support independent oversight of the department. The message is clear: it's time for New York City to turn away from an approach to policing that results in countless rights violations each year, while doing little to reduce crime, according to an analysis by the Center for Constitutional Rights.
The bills passed by city council respond to increasing evidence that in too many cases the department has substituted stereotyping for real police work. A study by the New York Civil Liberties Union found that in 2011, for example, 41.6% of all New Yorkers stopped by the NYPD were black and Latino men between the ages of 14 and 24 years old, despite the fact that that these groups make up a mere 4.7% of the city's population. The department has continued to defend these discriminatory tactics, despite evidence that they do not even succeed on their own terms, failing to take guns off the street or to significantly reduce crime. In more than 99% of all 2011 stops, for example, no gun was retrieved. And in the first three months of 2013, crime dropped, even as stops also tapered, undermining the department's claim that stop-and-frisk is responsible for the city's lowered crime rate.
All of this suggests that the department's continued reliance on discriminatory tactics is not about what it takes to actually keep all New Yorkers (and those visiting the city) safe. Instead, it is about what it takes to convince some in New York City's whiter, wealthier communities that the administration and the department are serious about public safety.
For too long, too many city leaders have accepted discriminatory policing tactics on the assumption that the costs borne by the New Yorkers who are targeted are outweighed by the benefits enjoyed by communities that are not singled out for unlawful and abusive treatment. But the truth is the NYPD's discriminatory policies and practices have indirect negative impacts on all who live in the city, including its white residents. They allow the NYPD to substitute crude and ineffective strategies – like stopping New Yorkers on the basis of their race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or gender expression – for the sophisticated police work one might expect from the nation's largest local law enforcement agency. In the process, they position NYPD officers as adversaries instead of allies of many of the communities they are charged with protecting, reducing willingness to report crime and making all New Yorkers less safe.
It is becoming increasingly apparent, then, that the costs of massive spending on ineffective policing strategies extend beyond those borne by the individuals who are unlawfully targeted in the streets each day. But the most powerful argument for increased NYPD accountability has nothing to do with financial costs and benefits and everything to do with what we, as New Yorkers, allow to be done in our names. And it is about staying true to the city's own legacy of innovation and the conviction that here – if nowhere else – we can find a way to keep everyone safe without sacrificing anyone's rights.
City Council made an important choice today. They stopped endorsing a set of NYPD policies and practices that are discriminatory, ineffective and wasteful. They chose instead to guarantee safety and respect across the boroughs. The choices that they and other city leaders will make in the coming weeks, months and years as these bills are enacted and implemented will have a lasting impact on New York City and hopefully set a better example for cities across the country.
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Hundreds rally in a DC church for DACA solution
Hundreds of people rallied Wednesday inside of a church near the U.S. Capitol demanding legislation to protect young,...
Hundreds of people rallied Wednesday inside of a church near the U.S. Capitol demanding legislation to protect young, undocumented immigrants and replace the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Read the full article here.
Promueven petición contra Wells Fargo y JPMorgan por “financiar el dolor” de inmigrantes
Promueven petición contra Wells Fargo y JPMorgan por “financiar el dolor” de inmigrantes
La petición cuenta con el respaldo de más de 70 organizaciones bajo el paraguas de la coalición #FamiliesBelongTogether...
La petición cuenta con el respaldo de más de 70 organizaciones bajo el paraguas de la coalición #FamiliesBelongTogether, que incluye a Presente.org, la Unión de Libertades Civiles de EEUU (ACLU), MoveOn.org, Amnistía Internacional, la Alianza Nacional de Trabajadoras Domésticas, MomsRising, Center for Popular Democracy, y Make the Road New York, entre otras.
Lea el artículo completo aquí.
Carlos Menchaca: Sunset Park’s Councilman Brings A Voice To The Voiceless
Carlos Menchaca: Sunset Park’s Councilman Brings A Voice To The Voiceless
New York City Council Member Carlos Menchaca loves to grow spices and chilies to add to his home cooked meals — but...
New York City Council Member Carlos Menchaca loves to grow spices and chilies to add to his home cooked meals — but when it comes to choosing his favorite Mexican food spot in Sunset Park, he doesn’t play favorites.
“That’s a hard one,” Menchaca chuckled. “I always order tacos al pastor with a side of Mexican rice and beans,” he said of his traditional go-to dish. It binds him to his Mexican roots and the vibrant immigrant community that has adopted him as their hometown hero.
“What I love about Sunset Park is that anywhere you go, Bush Terminal Park, the senior center, down 5th Avenue, or even 8th Avenue, you feel at home,” Menchaca, who also represents Red Hook, parts of Bensonhurst and Borough Park, told the Sunset Park Voice. “It’s a neighborhood of families.”
A large majority of those Sunset Park families hail from the neighborhood’s Mexican and Asian immigrant communities — the two largest ethnic groups in New York City, after Dominicans, according to Census data — which stood firmly behind Menchaca during his 2013 run for District 38 council member.
Menchaca made history as the first Mexican-American Democrat elected to serve in the New York City Council. His victory over an incumbent councilwoman signified the rise of Mexican Americans in the political landscape, putting the young trailblazer on the map.
“We grew as a family. They took care of me and I took care of them,” Menchaca said of his constituents.
The 35-year-old Manchaca already knew he wanted to go into politics while growing up in the border town of El Paso, Texas, described himself as a “feisty kid, wanting to know everything” to advocate for his family.
He witnessed his single mother, Magdalena, struggle to raise seven children on her own.
“I don’t know how she did it,” Menchaca said of the hardships the family faced. “We interacted with government all the time, and it made me passionate about understanding how the system could be better.”
The first in his family to graduate from college, Menchaca holds a degree from the University of San Francisco in performing arts and social justice. His experience in political activism led him to New York to join the Coro Fellows Program – where he learned the value of community-government relations.
Since then, he’s made it his mission to bridge communities and as a council member he introduced participatory budgeting in Sunset Park – a democratic process that allows residents to decide how to spend a public budget and where taxpayers dollars go to fund their neighborhoods.
Menchaca’s success at empowering disenfranchised communities through the initiative has garnered write-ups in The New York Times, DNAInfo, and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. In his first year of PB, two-thirds of the ballots in his district were cast in Spanish and Chinese.
“Whether you live or work here, your voice matters, and what we’ve been able to do through participatory budgeting is bring opportunities to invite everyone to the table no matter their age, sexual orientation, or immigration status,” Menchaca said.
As Chair of the Committee on Immigration and member of the LGBT Caucus, Menchaca sponsored the 2015 launch of IDNYC, a municipal identification card offered to New Yorkers and undocumented immigrants. It gave them an opportunity to have legal identification without fears of deportation, open a bank account, access to public places, among other benefits.
But Menchaca was just getting started.
His next mission: Invest in adult education to help immigrant New Yorkers learn English. Menchaca says he receives daily letters at his legislative office from non-English speaking parents requesting for classes to help them communicate with their children’s teachers.
That’s why he’s advocating for $16 million and calling on Mayor Bill de Blasio to fund the Adult Literacy Initiative they way he did with universal pre-kindergarten. A recent report by the Center for Popular Democracy and Make the Road New York suggests that these classes could raise immigrants’ wages and reduce income inequality in impoverished communities.
“This is where it gets serious,” Menchaca said. “We think about gentrification and all the things that make us so afraid, because we don’t know what it is. But one thing that’s clear is how we can affect family’s lives through education.”
As our conversation steered towards immigration reform and the importance of ethnic and community media, Menchaca’s calm demeanor turned sympathetic. The 102-year-old El Diario/La Presna, the nation’s oldest Spanish language newspaper, laid off nearly half of its staff due to budget cuts, which shocked its readers, including Menchaca.
“The second I heard those real issues of El Diario, I called for a public hearing,” he said. He calls ethnic and community media a lifeline to many people in the city because it connects them to job postings, news, and immigration issues vital to families.
An hour before the hearing, Mayor Bill de Blasio and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito announced, via press release, an expansion of the administrations outreach to community and ethnic media companies across the city. In addition, the city created an online directory of 200 media ethnic media outlets, that will be available to city agencies and the city vowed to place more advertising in the ethnic papers.
Aside from the legal and education proposals, gentrification is another issue Menchaca’s community knows all too well. People have seen the factory district west of the Gowanus Expressway redeveloped as Industry City, a home for trendy shops, hip cafes, and markets like the Brooklyn Flea and Smorgasburg aimed at food fanatics.
In February, when the mayor proposed the BQX Connector, a streetcar line that would link Sunset Park to Astoria, Queens, some residents feared this new development would accelerate gentrification in their waterfront neighborhood, but the councilman says it can also ease transportation woes in his district.
“We are in desperate need of transportation options and I think the BQX serves as one idea we need to explore,” Menchaca said. “We want to increase the ability for people to travel outside the neighborhood for jobs.”
People have been vocal on fixing the R trains, the extension of bus lines, potentially bringing Citi bike and the ferry into their communities. For now, Menchaca sees the BXQ as an economic development to help community members, but it will only happen if people work together, he noted.
Menchaca confirmed that he plans to embark on a City Council re-election campaign in 2017.
What will his campaign be about? Preserving manufacturing jobs in Sunset Park, protecting immigrants through legal services, and shaping how the police force works with the community, he said.
“No matter the immigration status, you help everybody, and when you do that, you get these beautiful communities that are so diverse,” said Menchaca.
Clarification [June 2, 10am]: An earlier version of the headline misleadingly referred to the councilman as Sunset Park’s hometown hero, although he was not born in New York. We’ve adjusted the headline accordingly.
BY ELIZABETH ELIZALDE
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Kansas And Missouri Activists Gather On Troost To Stand For 'Moral Economy'
NPR - March 6, 2015, by Cody Newill - Community activists and faith leaders from Kansas and Missouri rallied at the...
NPR - March 6, 2015, by Cody Newill - Community activists and faith leaders from Kansas and Missouri rallied at the intersection of 63rd Street and Troost Avenue Thursday, calling for a "moral economy."
One issue that several speakers focused on was a recent comment by Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City president Esther George suggesting that interest rates may be increased to combat inflation.
Rev. Stan Runnels of St. Paul's Episcopal Church believes that raising interest rates now would hurt low-wage earners and undo economic progress that has been slowly mounting in the last several years.
"Right now, there is some opportunity for us to move in the direction of an improved economy," Runnels said. "We're concerned that if we begin dabbling with these other metrics, like worrying about inflation, we could scramble that up."
The rally was held outside a fast-food restaurant and payday loan lender, which organizer Andrew Kling with the group Communities Creating Opportunity says is symbolic of the economic troubles that face minorities.
"These are two of the greatest challenges that working people face in this economy: low wages and predatory industries that thrive on taking away the wealth and earnings of working people struggling to get through," Kling said. "We should not accept double-digit unemployment in the black community as normal."
The activists also called for an end to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' use of averaged unemployment rates, which they say ignores racial disparities. For example, Kansas City's unemployment rate as a whole sits around 5 percent, but the rate of black citizens without jobs is 12.6 percent.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its February employment statistics Friday, which showed the U.S. economy as a whole at 5.5 percent unemployment.
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Why Recent Stock Volatility Shouldn’t Factor Into Interest-Rate Hikes
As a general principle, the Fed should not react to short-term movements in the financial markets. For one thing, the...
As a general principle, the Fed should not react to short-term movements in the financial markets. For one thing, the labor market is much more important to the lives of most Americans, and it is more relevant to the Fed’s mandate of securing maximum employment with inflation stability.
Then consider this: More than 80% of stock wealth in the U.S. is owned by the wealthiest 10% of Americans, and more than half of Americans own no stocks at all (either directly or through retirement or other accounts). In short, movements in the stock markets do not have much effect on the spending power of most U.S. households. That means that movements in the stock markets–especially short-term volatility that is likely to largely dissipate–provides little information about the overall state of economic health.
On the other hand, the labor market provides the vast majority of income to the vast majority of Americans. The middle fifth of households, for example, gets more than 80% of household income directly from the labor market (either cash wages or employer-provided benefits). Further, many additional sources of income such as pensions, Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance, or the Earned Income Tax Credit hinge on participation in the labor market. That’s why trends in the labor market are crucial to assessing the overall state of the economy–which is far from fully recovered from the Great Recession.
The clearest remaining weakness is wages. The current pace of hourly wage growth is roughly 2% to 2.5%. A healthy labor market that met the Fed’s overall price inflation target should be churning out wage increases of at least 3.5%. Further, a period of wage growth well above this is necessary for workers’ pay to reclaim some of the ground lost to corporate profits earlier in this recovery. Until wage growth starts moving durably toward the healthy 3.5% target, it’s too early for the Fed to begin raising rates.
This labor-market-based reasoning for keeping rates low should weigh much more heavily on Fed calculations about interest rates than recent stock activity. The only caveat: if one of the root causes of recent stock market declines–the slowdown in the Chinese economy–provides a new potential headwind to U.S. growth going forward.
But the case for keeping rates unchanged in September was dispositive last week, even before large declines in the stock markets. And any strong stock rally in the coming month shouldn’t make Fed officials feel fine about raising rates.
Source: Wall Street Journal
Low-wage workers pick their next battleground
Just four years ago, fast food workers in New York City walked off the job, launching the first strike to ever hit the...
Just four years ago, fast food workers in New York City walked off the job, launching the first strike to ever hit the industry and a movement that has had rapid success. Calling for a $15 minimum wage and the right to form a union, the Fight for 15 started staging strikes and protests in a growing number of cities — the last day of action reached 320 — that drew in workers beyond fast food, including adjunct professors, childcare providers, and retail workers.
That fight is by no means over, but it has led to surprising victories. Today, two states have passed increases to bring their minimum wages to $15 an hour, as have a number of major cities.
Now workers are pushing forward on a new demand: the right to consistent and predictable schedules.
In many ways, advocates see this as a natural extension of the Fight for 15. After all, higher hourly pay means little if you never know you’ll have enough hours to make ends meet or if a last-minute change disrupts your plans for childcare or transportation.
“Workers who have experienced their wage increase and then see their hours cut the next week more than anything know that their paycheck is their wages times hours,” pointed out Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy.
Erratic and unpredictable scheduling has become a more and more common problem. “The erosion of unions, compounded by the accelerated pace of change and the nature of work, has only increased the need for updating our standards around hours,” she said.
At least 17 percent of all workers have irregular schedules, including changing or on-call shifts or working two shifts in one day. Over 40 percent of workers don’t find their schedules out until a week in advance, while 40 percent say their hours vary week to week. It’s especially prevalent in service sector jobs; huge numbers of retail workers in New York City and food service workers in Washington say they don’t get enough notice of their hours each week.
“The fight for just hours is definitely the next movement for people trying to achieve security for their families.”
“The fight for just hours is definitely the next movement for people trying to achieve security for their families,” Gleason added. “New energy has been generated with the Fight for 15, and as policymakers have raised the minimum wage and passed paid sick days across the country, they’re turning their attention to the crisis around hours finally.”
The movement has already notched victories. In 2014, San Francisco became the first city to pass legislation regulating schedules, enacting a law that requires retail chains to give employees two weeks notice of their schedules, pay them if shifts change at the last minute, give current workers the opportunity to take on more hours before new hires are brought in, and to treat part-time workers similarly as full-time ones.
Then on Monday evening, the Seattle city council voted unanimously to pass a law that looks very similar. It will require large employers in retail and food service to give employees two weeks notice of schedules, extra pay for last-minute changes, and input into what their schedules will look like. It will also get rid of “clopenings,” or when employees work a closing shift one day only to come in early the next morning to open.
Seattle workers had already helped secure a $15 minimum wage increase in 2014. And it was after that victory that the conversation around scheduling began.
“It really became apparent during the 15 campaign that workers not only needed a higher minimum wage, but they needed more stable schedules,” said Sejal Parikh, executive director of Working Washington. After that campaign resulted in a victory, “workers started talking about what the next campaign would be: Making sure the minimum wage is enforced, and figuring out how to get to more secure schedules in the city.”
It’s “the natural other half of the 15 dollar campaign,” she added.
It’s “the natural other half of the 15 dollar campaign.”
That effort also coincided with one targeted at Starbucks. In the summer of 2014, shortly after a New York Times exposé on the company’s scheduling practices, Starbucks announced that it would make changes such as ending clopenings and posting schedules three weeks out.
But a year ago this month, Starbucks baristas in Seattle launched a campaign accusing the company of unevenly implementing these practices and still allowing workers’ schedules to be erratic.
Those two groups of workers got together and began talking to the city council late last year, and Parikh said they got a warm reception. The issue “really resonated with people,” she said. “Many of us have worked in retail or fast food or coffee and could recall times when we didn’t know what our schedule would be.” Workers were deeply involved in crafting the legislation, too: it was built around answers to surveys sent out to fast food employees and baristas asking them about their priorities.
It helped to be able to work with those in San Francisco who worked on the passage of the bill there and have been implementing it since. “Because San Francisco went first, we have a piece of policy where we’ve learned a lot of lessons,” she said.
“It’s really catching on,” she added. “I think it’s going to be one of the next pieces of labor policy across the country.”
It’s already reached the other coast. Seattle’s victory came just a week after New York City said it would start working on being the next. Last Thursday, Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) announced that he, along with legislators and advocates, would begin crafting legislation aimed at improving scheduling for fast food workers. While the details will be hashed out in the months to come, he focused on two weeks advance notice, compensation for last-minute changes, and cracking down on clopenings.
“It’s really catching on.”
“It’s time for us to use the power of city government to make sure that people are treated decently,” he said at the press conference announcing the new effort.
New York City, home to the first fast food strike, now has a $15 minimum wage thanks to the state increase. “If [workers are] making 15 an hour, it doesn’t really matter if they don’t know when they’re actually making that money,” said Freddi Goldstein, deputy press secretary for the mayor. Scheduling “just felt like a natural next step.”
And as Seattle looked to San Francisco for guidance, New York will work with people in those two cities to see what worked and what didn’t.
The city is only looking at the fast food industry so far because, Goldstein said, it’s a workforce that is rarely unionized and “highly abused.” But it’s possible the focus could expand beyond that industry in the future, and as the effort to craft the legislation unfolds new planks could also be added. “I wouldn’t say we haven’t decided to do or not do anything at this point,” she said.
The scheduling movement hasn’t met with a totally unbroken string of successes: On Tuesday the D.C. city council voted to table a bill that would have addressed scheduling, killing it for the current session. Councilmember Elissa Silverman vowed to introduce a new version of the bill in the next one.
But the idea is starting to spread. It’s cropped up in Minneapolis, MN and Emeryville, CA. A scheduling bill has also been introduced in Congress, although it hasn’t advanced. “We’re already seeing policymakers step up across the country,” the Center for Popular Democracy’s Gleason said.
“The movement for the Fair Labor Standards Act was about wages and the 40-hour workweek,” she added. “It’s only natural that we’re seeing the demand for just wages and hours back again.”
By Bryce Covert
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23 hours ago
23 hours ago