CPD IN THE NEWS

The man with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, who caught national attention for confronting Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) last year about the Republican tax bill, has launched a new “Be a Hero” campaign targeting Republicans. In a new minute-long TV and online ad running ahead of an April 24 election in Arizona’s 8th congressional district, Ady Barkan slams Republicans for pushing tax legislation that could affect his health care if lower tax revenue leads to eventual federal benefit cuts.

Read the full article here.

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.

Source

Before Senator Jeff Flake shocked the world by requesting an FBI investigation into sexual assault claims made by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on Friday, the Arizona Republican was confronted in an elevator by two protestors who attempted to convince him to call for the probe. The scene was caught on video by people in the hallway, and may have ultimately tipped the scales in Flake’s determining whether to make his pitch to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Read the full article here.

Bloomberg Businessweek - November 13, 2014, by Josh Eidelson - In the midterm elections, four red states—Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota—passed minimum wage increases. Those votes mean that, starting next year, a majority of states will have minimum wages higher than the federal rate. The last time that happened, in 2007, Democrats newly in control of Congress used their power to pass the first national increase in a decade, from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour. It’s extremely unlikely the Republicans who took back the Senate in the midterm elections will do the same. “Waiting for Congress to act is frustrating and, at this point, pointless,” says Ed Flanagan, a former Alaska labor commissioner who spent a year campaigning for his state’s new increase, from $7.75 to $9.75.

Already, labor organizers in Oregon are considering a ballot initiative for 2016 that would raise the state minimum to $15 an hour, matching the leap taken this year by Seattle and San Francisco. In Los Angeles, where Mayor Eric Garcetti signed an ordinance mandating a $15.37 wage floor for some hotel workers in October, 6 of the 15 members of the city council have asked for a vote in early 2015 on a proposal to increase the city’s rate to $15.25 across the board by 2019.

Voters in most states shouldn’t expect to see pushes for higher rates than that anytime soon. Labor activists say they want to end the exclusion of tipped workers such as restaurant wait staff from minimum wage laws and add worker protections, like requiring employers to give workers advance notice of schedule changes or offer paid sick days. That approach worked this year in Oakland, where voters approved a referendum on Nov. 4 that lifts wages only to $12.25 but requires employers to offer paid leave above what the state requires. “When you combine them together, it’s actually more popular,” says Brian Kettenring, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, a union-backed community organizing group. “People appreciate that you are trying to actually solve the problem.”

Not all the coming fights will be put directly to voters. In California, Democratic Governor Jerry Brown signed a compromise bill last year increasing the statewide minimum from $8 to $10 by 2016. Some Democratic state lawmakers say that’s not enough to help workers make ends meet. “It will still allow the legal payment of a poverty wage,” says Mark Leno, the state senator who sponsored a bill that would have increased minimum pay to $13 by 2017 and then indexed future wage levels to inflation. That passed the state senate in May but failed by a single vote in an assembly committee. Leno plans to revive the issue in the next legislative session.

In some cities, Democrats are pitting themselves against the Republicans who control their state governments. Louisville has held hearings about raising wages to $10.10 after a statewide increase died in the Republican-controlled state senate. City officials in other states are hamstrung by laws prohibiting municipal governments from raising minimum wages above state levels. In June, business-friendly Democrats in Rhode Island’s statehouse killed efforts by the Providence city council to raise hotel pay to $15 an hour with a budget rider barring cities from setting their own minimum wages. In New York, where state law denies cities authority over pay rates, Governor Andrew Cuomo agreed to support changing that statute, along with a statewide increase to $10.10, to win the endorsement of the progressive Working Families Party in the November gubernatorial election. “He made a promise on this,” says Bill Lipton, the party’s New York director. “We expect him to fulfill it.”

Source