NY Democrats Seek Citizen Rights for Illegal Immigrants
New York Post - September 15, 2014, by Carl Campanile - Illegal aliens in New York could score billions in Medicaid...
New York Post - September 15, 2014, by Carl Campanile - Illegal aliens in New York could score billions in Medicaid and college-tuition money — along with driver’s licenses, voting rights and even the ability to run for office — if Democrats win control of the state Senate in November, the Post has learned.
A little-known bill, dubbed “New York is Home,” would offer the most sweeping amnesty available anywhere in the country to nearly 3 million noncitizens living in the Empire State.
It would bar police from releasing any information about them to the feds, unless it involves a criminal warrant unrelated to their immigration status.
Under the proposed legislation, undocumented immigrants could also apply for professional licenses and serve on juries.
The plan hinges on Democrats — who now control both the governorship and the state Assembly — wresting control of the Senate from Republicans, who oppose immigration amnesty.
Bronx Sen. Gustavo Rivera, who is sponsoring the legislation in the upper chamber, said he thinks the bill would be in position to be passed “if we have a stable Democratic majority in the Senate.”
He also likened his measure to the campaigns to legalize same-sex marriage and medical marijuana.
“It’s something I believe in,” Rivera said Sunday night. “It’s something the state can do and should do.
Democratic Brooklyn Assemblyman Karim Camara, the chief Assembly sponsor, agreed that taking the Senate was key, saying “The bill would have a better shot at passing with a Democratic Senate.”
“I look forward [to] having a robust conversation about how significant this bill is.”
But the GOP plans on using the proposal to warn voters how radical New York would become if Democrats take charge.
Republicans are already referring to it as the “illegal immigrants benefits legislation” and will make the bill their poster child in elections in more conservative upstate and suburban districts.
“This bill could pass if the Democrats are in charge of the Senate. They’re out of their minds,” said Sen. Marty Golden (R-Brooklyn).
“This is astounding. This undermines our nation’s immigration laws and procedures.”
Said state Conservative Party chairman Mike Long: “This is absolutely amnesty. It disregards the laws of the United States. It’s unconscionable,” Long added.
The bill was introduced during the waning days of the legislative session in June, and is backed by immigrant-rights groups including Make the Road New York, the Center for Popular Democracy, and La Fuente.
GOP officials maintain that amnesty for illegal aliens would open the door to fraud and abuse and increase the risk of terrorism.
For example, the bill would let illegals vote in local and state elections, but they would be barred by federal law from voting for presidential or congressional candidates.
Mayor de Blasio pushed through a new city law that created a municipal ID card that provides some benefits to noncitizens.
Camara, chairman of the New York State Black, Latino and Asian Caucus, insisted that only immigrants who prove they have been living productively would get benefits under his bill.
They would also have to show that they have been living in New York for at least three years and have paid taxes to the state.
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Neel Kashkari Named Next Minneapolis Fed President
Neel Kashkari, a former financier who managed the U.S. Treasury’s $700 billion rescue of banks in the 2008 crisis, was...
Neel Kashkari, a former financier who managed the U.S. Treasury’s $700 billion rescue of banks in the 2008 crisis, was named the next president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
Kashkari’s resume includes stops at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Pacific Investment Management Co., and a failed run for governor of California last year. At the Treasury, he was Secretary Henry Paulson’s key aide in overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Kashkari will take over from Narayana Kocherlakota on January 1, 2016, according to a statement Tuesday from the Minneapolis Fed.
“He has a little bit of all the pieces you’d want in a Fed president,” said Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Amherst Pierpont Securities LLC in Stamford, Connecticut.
As head of one of 12 regional Fed banks, Kashkari will join the Federal Open Market Committee, the central bank’s policy making panel. The Fed is weighing ending a seven-year era of near-zero interest rates, with investors betting it will move next month. Kashkari is not scheduled to vote on policy decisions until 2017. Kocherlakota, as is customary for outgoing FOMC members, will not attend the December meeting.
QE ‘Morphine’
Kocherlakota is one of the Fed’s most dovish policy makers who has argued it should keep rates on hold into next year. Kashkari has offered observations on monetary policy via his twitter feed, without spelling out whether he would favor raising rates or delaying liftoff in the current climate. In an April 2013 comment he likened the Bank of Japan’s asset purchase program to “morphine. makes u feel better but doesn’t cure.”
“I don’t think we know that much” about Kashkari’s views on monetary policy, said Angel Ubide, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “My experience with people who get appointed is whatever they thought before and what they do later doesn’t necessarily correlate.”
Kashkari, 42, earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He began his career as an aerospace engineer at TRW Inc. in Redondo Beach, California.
Goldman Sachs
Kashkari’s appointment places another ex-Goldman Sachs banker at the helm of a regional Fed bank. Robert Steven Kaplan at the Dallas Fed and New York’s William C. Dudley are Goldman alums. Philadelphia Fed chief Patrick Harker previously served as a trustee at Goldman Sachs Trust and as a member of the board of managers of Goldman Sachs Hedge Fund Partners Registered Fund.
“We’re disappointed that yet another former Goldman Sachs insider has been elevated to a regional president position,” said Jordan Haedtler at the Center for Popular Democracy in Washington.
Such appointments need “more transparency and public input,” said Haedtler, who’s deputy campaign manager at Fed Up, a national coalition that’s calling for changes at the central bank and wants to keep rates low to boost employment.
Kashkari worked at Goldman in the early 2000s before accepting a post at the Treasury in 2006. He joined Pimco, then led by bond fund manager Bill Gross, in 2009 to help oversee an expansion into equities, an attempt to reduce the firm’s heavy dependence on the fixed-income market. When he left in 2013, the company’s equity unit had attracted $10 billion in assets, or less than 1 percent of the firm’s total assets at the time.
Bank Bailout
TARP, approved by Congress in October 2008, remains one of the more controversial measures taken during the financial crisis. It authorized the government to purchase up to $700 billion in troubled assets from financial institutions, in an effort to bolster global credit markets. The government ultimately used $475 billion, including $250 billion to stabilize banks, $82 billion to bail out auto makers and $70 billion to save insurer American International Group Inc., according to the Treasury’s website.
“Mr. Kashkari is an influential leader whose combined experience in the public and private sectors makes him the ideal candidate to head the Minneapolis Fed,” said MayKao Hang, incoming chair of the Minneapolis Fed’s board of directors and co-chair of the search committee.
Kashkari, a Republican, was defeated by incumbent California Governor Jerry Brown in November 2014, getting 43 percent of the vote to Brown’s 57 percent.
Presidents of the 12 regional Fed banks are appointed by a portion of their respective boards of directors, subject to the approval of the Fed Board in Washington. Reserve bank boards typically consist of nine members, including three bankers. The banking members are excluded under Dodd-Frank from participating in the selection of presidents.
Source: Bloomberg Business
The Fed needs a revolution: Why America’s central bank is failing — and how we can make it work for us
The Fed needs a revolution: Why America’s central bank is failing — and how we can make it work for us
One reality hanging over the presidential election and our politics in general is this: No matter what terrific plan a...
One reality hanging over the presidential election and our politics in general is this: No matter what terrific plan a politician has for creating jobs and boosting wages, it must contend with the Federal Reserve’s ability to unilaterally counteract it. If the Fed decides higher wages risk inflation, they can raise interest rates and deliberately strangle economic growth, reversing the wage effect. Why come up with ways to grow the economy, then, if the Fed will react by intentionally slowing it?
The reason the Fed operates as a wet blanket on the economy has to do with who really controls the institution. If the desires of bankers and the rich outweigh the desires of laborers, then their fear of inflation (which cuts into their profits) will always take precedence over full employment. Former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke unwittingly gave a perfect example of that yesterday. Talking about how the Fed could institute “helicopter drops” of money to supplement federal spending and jump-start the economy, he stated from the outset, “no responsible government would ever literally drop money from the sky.” Who sets the boundaries of what’s “responsible” matters a great deal here.
To make the central bank work in the public interest rather than the interests of a select few, you must reform the very structure of the Federal Reserve. That’s the purpose of a new proposal from Andrew Levin, an economics professor at Dartmouth College and former advisor to Fed Chairs Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen. In conjunction with the activist group Fed Up, which advocates for pro-worker policies at the Fed, Levin has devised a framework to make the central bank a fully public institution, with all the transparency and accountability demanded of other government entities.
It’s such an important idea that Warren Gunnels, policy director for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, talked it up yesterday on a conference call with Levin. While stopping short of endorsing taking the Fed public, Gunnels did say, “Senator Sanders believes we need to made the Fed a more democratic institution, responsive to the concerns of all Americans, not a few billionaires on Wall Street.”
Right now, the Fed is a quasi-public, quasi-private hybrid, taking advantage of that status to maintain high levels of secrecy. Members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, like other federal agencies. But the twelve regional Federal Reserve banks are legally owned by commercial banks in each of those regions. Banks like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo hold stock in these regional banks, which happen to be one of their primary regulators.
This was how central banks worldwide operated at the time of the Fed’s founding, but that has changed. “Every other central bank around the world is fully public,” Professor Levin said, citing the Bank of Canada’s shift in the 1930s and the Bank of England in the 1940s.
Not only does having private banks own a chunk of the Fed raise questions about regulatory supervision, it implicitly privileges banker concerns over the public at large. This is particularly important because the Fed has failed as an institution consistently over the past decade.
First it failed to identify an $8 trillion housing bubble, along with increases in leverage and derivatives exposure that magnified the housing collapse into a larger crisis. Then, it failed to deploy all its policy tools and allowed a slow recovery to take hold that left millions of workers behind, as growth never caught up to its expectations. British economist Simon Wren-Lewis believes the third big mistake is happening now, through premature interest rate hikes to return to “normal” operations. “Central banks are wasting a huge amount of potential resources” by tightening too quickly, Wren-Lewis says. For everyday Americans, that translates into millions more people out of work than necessary.
So Levin’s plan would cash out the banks’ stock, and begin to remove their influence over the Fed. The board of directors of the regional Fed banks, which currently includes commercial bank executives, would be chosen through a representative process with mandates for diversity (no African-American has ever served as a regional Fed president) and a variety of viewpoints. Nobody affiliated with a financial institution overseen by the Fed could serve on any regional board.
These newly elected boards of directors would choose the regional presidents, which have a say on monetary policy decisions. That selection process would include public hearings and feedback. Under the current system, Fed presidents are re-elected through a pro forma process, with no opportunity for public engagement. Four of the 12 regional presidents were formerly executives at Goldman Sachs, and it’s hard to call that a coincidence.
In addition to breaking the conflict of interest inherent in current Fed governance, making the institution public would subject it to disclosure requirements, Freedom of Information Act requests, and external reviews that all other public agencies must submit to. Levin’s proposal calls for an annual Government Accountability Office review of Fed policies and procedures, and would allow the Fed’s inspector general new authority to investigate the regional banks.
The Levin proposal too often makes concessions to preserving central bank “independence,” like preserving the regional structure and giving Fed officials nonrenewable seven-year terms, which seems a little arbitrary. This impulse also led Democrats to reject Sen. Rand Paul’s legislation to audit the Fed earlier this year. The rhetoric of Federal Reserve “independence” conceals an institutional capture that allows it to ignore workers’ needs in favor of the wealthy. And its persistent failures and banker influence weaken the case for that independence.
Nevertheless, the heart of the proposal is to return democracy to the Fed, so the institution will edge away from its commitment to capital over labor. “The fundamental piece is that the Fed must be a public institution,” said Ady Barkan of the Fed Up Coalition.
Liberals too often ignore the Fed and the role it plays in the economy, but that’s starting to change. An obscure piece of the Federal Reserve Act statute identified by then-House staffer Matt Stoller led to a remarkable cut of billions of dollars in subsidies to big banks last year, under a Republican-majority Congress. Now the Fed Up coalition is not only rolling out this reform plan, but pushing the presidential candidates to answer whether the Fed should deliberately slow down the economy, make sure their institution looks like the general public, and reduce the power of private banks on its operations. (Bernie Sanders laid out his views on Fed reform in the New York Times last December, some of which intersect with the Fed Up proposal. Warren Gunnels, Sanders’ Policy Director, would only say that the Fed Up plan “deserves serious consideration.”)
A public, inclusive debate over Fed transparency and accountability is critical, given the importance of this institution to the economy. “These reforms would put the Fed on a path to serving the public for the next 100 years,” said Professor Levin. And that has to mean all the public, through democratic principles, not just the executives at our biggest banks.
By David Dayen
Source
Amazon’s $15 an Hour Minimum Wage and the Federal Reserve Board
This is where Fed Up played an incredible role. They were a crucial voice on the other side, constantly reminding the...
This is where Fed Up played an incredible role. They were a crucial voice on the other side, constantly reminding the Fed of its legal mandate to promote full employment. Fed Up had important allies in this effort, most importantly former Fed chair Janet Yellen, but it is likely that Yellen and her allies on the FOMC would have been forced to raise rates sooner and faster if not for pressure from Fed Up.
Read the full article here.
Fed Up group plans counter Jackson Hole conference
The Fed Up coalition, made up of community activist groups, has rented a conference room in the same hotel where the...
The Fed Up coalition, made up of community activist groups, has rented a conference room in the same hotel where the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank will be holding its annual Jackson Hole conference starting Thursday.
The group said Monday it will bring in low-wage workers from around the country who are struggling to make ends meet to emphasize the need for the Fed to do more to attack income inequality.
"Our life is a constant struggle. We know we have to pay the rent, buy food and pay the utilities on a very limited budget," Dawn O'Neal, a teaching assistant at a day care center in Atlanta, told reporters on a conference call Monday.
The mother of four said she made $8.50 an hour at her job and her husband, who is currently unemployed, has been trying to earn money by lining up early in the morning to compete for part-time construction jobs.
Ady Barkan with the Center for Popular Democracy and campaign director for Fed Up said that before Fed officials "can have a real discussion of raising interest rates and slowing the economy, they should understand firsthand who it would effect."
Barkan joked that while the Kansas City Fed charges $1,000 per person for its conference, participation in the teach-in will be free. In addition to arguing that raising rates now would be premature, the group will hold discussions on ways to reform the Fed's current selection process for the presidents of the Fed's 12 regional banks.
The group has protested the recent selection of Robert Kaplan, a former top executive at Goldman Sachs and currently associate dean at the Harvard Business School, as the new president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, saying the selection process shut out input from community groups.
While the Fed announced in May that Yellen would not be attending this year's conference, Fed Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer is scheduled to deliver comments on inflation during a panel discussion at Jackson Hole on Saturday.
Financial markets will be closely examining those comments for any hints about whether the Fed is still likely to boost interest rates at its Sept. 16-17 meeting despite a huge sell-off in recent days in stocks that saw the Dow Jones industrial average fall another 588.47 points or 3.6 percent on Monday.
Source: CNBC
Advocacy group calls for more oversight of California charter school spending
Advocacy group calls for more oversight of California charter school spending
A lack of transparency and inadequate oversight can set up the potential for waste, fraud, and abuse. A 2015 report...
A lack of transparency and inadequate oversight can set up the potential for waste, fraud, and abuse. A 2015 report from the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools and the Center for Popular Democracy, entitled “The Tip of the Iceberg,” reported over $200 million lost to fraud, corruption and mismanagement in charter schools.
Read the full article here.
Scaffold Law Debate Heats Up Over Dueling Reports on Safety and Costs
Legislative Gazetter - April 21, 2014, by Matthew Dondiego - A new report released last Thursday by a pro-labor, pro-...
Legislative Gazetter - April 21, 2014, by Matthew Dondiego - A new report released last Thursday by a pro-labor, pro-immigrant rights advocacy group criticizes the construction industry for using what they call misleading figures and cherry picking data to lobby against the state's controversial "scaffold law."
The scaffold law is a century-old law in place to protect worker's rights. Under the law, contractors and property owners serving as contractors are responsible for providing a safe work environment for their employees or become liable for any on-site injuries and accidents.
Opponents of the law point out that contractors are fully liable for workers' injuries even if it is determined the worker is at fault. Opponents say it is outdated and causes construction costs to rise due to the increased costs of insurance premiums. Supporters of the law say it provides common sense protection for workers performing a dangerous job and maintain that contractors are not held liable in court if proper safety precautions are in place.
The new report, titled Fatally Flawed and released by the Center for Popular Democracy, which is supported financially by the New York State Trial Lawyers Association and labor unions, is a scathing criticism of a Rockefeller Institute study — which is frequently referenced by the construction industry — that concluded the scaffold law resulted in an additional 667 work site injuries and adds about $3 billion in additional costs to construction projects in New York state each year.
According to last week's report, the oft-cited Rockefeller Institute study is "fundamentally biased" and calls the New York Civil Justice Institute, which paid $82,800 to commission the Rockefeller study, "a poorly-disguised front group" for the construction industry aligned Lawsuit Reform Alliance of New York. According to the report, the Lawsuit Reform Alliance of New York and the New York Civil Justice Institute share the same address, 19 Dove St, Suite 201, Albany, N.Y., and the same telephone and fax numbers.
"This [Rockefeller Institute] study was bought and paid for by the construction industry," Josie Duffy, a staff attorney for the Center for Popular Democracy. "This is a direct result of people who do not like the scaffold law for business reasons, paying for this report to be released."
On the claim that the scaffold law contributed an additional 667 injuries, the report says the Rockefeller Institute "confuses correlation with causation."
This claim, according the Center for Popular Democracy, is based on worker injury rates in "sub-sectors and non-construction industries," such as warehouse work, transportation, roofing, residential building construction, manufacturing, wholesale trade and utilities industries, and are compared to the rest of the nation.
"The authors assert that these differences are greater in New York and attribute these greater differences entirely to the scaffold law," the new report reads. "There is simply no basis to conclude that the scaffold law is the cause of these differences. Indeed, the authors provide no justification for comparing injury rates in construction with injury rates in less hazardous industries, or using those differences as a proxy for the impact of the scaffold law."
Duffy bluntly says that the scaffold law does not cause an increase in workplace accidents. She says the Rockefeller Institute's study, which was released in February, lacks factual evidence that the law makes work sites more dangerous and "that number is coming from nowhere."
"To me, that is the most egregious part of this whole report," Duffy said.
Despite the strong words used in the report and by Duffy, Tom Stebbins, executive director of the Lawsuit Reform Alliance of New York, says that the Rockefeller report "conclusively" found the law made construction sites more dangerous for workers.
He said that absolute liability for contractors creates "perverse incentives" for workers.
"Workers are not incentivized because they are never held responsible and contractors are not incentivized because they are guilty in nearly every circumstance," Stebbins said. "Only by apportioning liability to fault, as is done in every other state and every other part of our civil justice system, can we maintain balance and improve safety."
According to Stebbins, the report released by the Center for Popular Democracy last week is a "political hit piece, with no statistical merit or actual research of any kind. They cannot get researchers to back up their opinions, because the facts do not support the scaffold law."
Stebbins argues that absolute liability causes the insurance markets to treat sites with sterling safety records the same as companies with less stringent safety precautions. Opponents of the scaffold law say that absolute liability holds the company liable for the worker injuries regardless of who is actually found to be at fault.
Duffy however, said that companies are not automatically found to be liable for injuries sustained by workers on construction sites and are typically safe from injury-related costs so long as they had the proper safety precautions in place.
"What absolute liability means is that you have to pay for the costs of the injuries … and that's only going to happen if you're breaking the law," she explained. "What this law says is there has to be some level of protection for workers."
According to Duffy, under the law companies still hold the right to argue their case in court and they are not automatically found responsible for every injury.
"It's important that employers get to have their voices heard in law, I support that this law allows people to get their voices heard on both sides and that's a very, very real protection," she said "Nothing happens automatically in this law and you can't even be taken to court unless your breaking the law in the first place."
The report also criticizes the Rockefeller Institute for failing to take into consideration certain conditions in New York that may affect the injury rates in the state. Such measures include New York generally has more high-level construction works which may drive up injury rates and New York construction workers are more likely to be union workers and therefore are more likely to report injuries. According to the report, Texas has one of the lowest construction injury rates yet is among the highest in construction fatality rates.
According to the report, "Such low-injury-rate states have artificially suppressed the US injury rate, which the paper nonetheless compares to the New York rate."
"This is a law that protects construction workers. Construction workers are doing a really difficult job and they're doing it every day and they are growing our economy," Duffy said. "Construction workers are literally the bread and butter of what makes New York City, New York City … and this is a state of construction."
Assemblyman Francisco Moya, a Democrat from Queens, said the Center for Popular Democracy's report "injected some truth into the politically-charged debate surrounding the scaffold law."
"Many untruths have been lobbed at the scaffold law in an attempt to dismantle it. This report makes clear that those untruths have unfortunately been crafted by parties who have a financial interest in watering down workplace protections," Moya, a staunch supporter of the law, said in an e-mail. "When it comes to life and death decisions about workplace safety, there's no room for politics. It has to be about facts. And the fact is that the Scaffold Law protects workers. That's the real bottom line."
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California’s Emeryville is third city to pass Fair Workweek policy
California’s Emeryville is third city to pass Fair Workweek policy
EMERYVILLE, Calif. – On Oct. 18, this city became the third in the nation to pass a Fair Workweek policy. The City...
EMERYVILLE, Calif. – On Oct. 18, this city became the third in the nation to pass a Fair Workweek policy. The City Council passed the ordinance unanimously at its first reading, following testimony at a pre-meeting press conference and during the meeting itself, by those most affected.
Under the new policy, employers will have to give workers their schedules two weeks in advance, compensating them for last-minute changes. When more hours become available, current workers will have priority so they can get closer to fulltime work.
The council must confirm its action with a second vote, scheduled for Nov. 1. The new law, which will affect some 4,000 fast food and retail workers, is to become effective in July 2017.
Almost two years ago, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors passed the first such measure, the Retail Workers Bill of Rights, and just last month, Seattle followed suit http://www.peoplesworld.org/article/tale-of-two-cities-yes-vs-no-on-fair....
New York City may be next: Mayor Bill de Blasio and City Council members are pressing legislation to require employers to give some 65,000 hourly fast food workers a two week notice of changes in their shift assignments. However, the bill doesn’t extend such requirements to retail stores or full-service restaurants.
Emeryville, a small city across the Bay from San Francisco with a large concentration of retail stores, already has the country’s highest minimum wage, with large employers required to pay their workers at least $14.82 per hour. Smaller businesses must pay at least $13 per hour.
At the state level, earlier this year California passed a new minimum wage law with a path to a $15 hourly minimum.
At the press conference, low wage workers, local residents, community and labor organizations, faith leaders and academic researchers told of the many challenges faced by retail workers who must deal with constantly shifting and unpredictable schedules and variable numbers of work hours.
Moriah Larkins, an Emeryville retail worker and activist with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) who MC’d the press conference, told of her own experience working six days a week for a “bad apple” employer. “And on my days off they would call me in, and I have my son, who was two years old at the time.”
At first, Larkins said, she used to scramble and pay extra for last minute child care. But as she realized her extra hours, and less time for her son, were making him unhappy, she started refusing the extra shifts. After that, her hours, which had been 32 to 40 per week, were cut in half.
“Now,” she said, “I work for a ‘good apple.’ I work 28 hours per week, I can pay all my bills, I can spend time with my son and finish my nursing degree.”
In a conversation after the press conference, Larkins said she hoped the ordinance would pass “without exceptions.” She and others are warning that before the final vote Nov. 1, the California Retail Association is trying hard to weaken the measure.
Other retail and fast food workers described their experiences, including a past employer who paid subminimum wages and another who fired a worker after “forgetting” he had accepted her timely request for a day off.
The new ordinance has been in the making for a while. In May, Emeryville Mayor Dianne Martinez and Councilmember Ruth Atkin wrote an op-ed published by the San Francisco Chronicle, in which they said a regional fair workweek was needed to assure workers “stable schedules so they can pay the bills, live healthier lives, “and contribute more to our communities.
A recent study, Wages and Hours: Why workers in Emeryville’s service sector need a fair workweek, conducted by ACCE, the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE), and the Center for Popular Democracy found that in a sample of more than 100 frontline Emeryville retail workers, some 68 percent had part-time schedules, 82 percent were people of color, eight out of 10 had variable schedules and nearly two-thirds only got their schedules a week or less in advance. Over two-thirds said they wanted to work more hours, while over half said they were scheduled for “clopening” shifts, or back-to-back closings and openings with less than 11 hours off.
The study concluded that employers need to commit to predictable, flexible and responsive schedules that allow for adequate rest.
At the Oct. 18 press conference, EBASE Deputy Director Jennifer Lin said, “Providing a fair work week is not only good for workers, it’s good for business, too.” With many retailers already scheduling in advance, she said, the new ordinance will help level the playing field, and stable schedules and more adequate hours also reduce turnover and absenteeism.
In an article earlier this month in The Nation magazine, author Michelle Chen noted that the Fight for $15 and Fair Workweek struggles are “converging on sectors that used to be known as bastions of dead-end jobs.” The next step, she said, is “to organize, and unionize, to give workers real collective bargaining leverage over their wages and working conditions. Work-life balance comes by shifting the power balance on the job, so that workers have the final say over when they’re on call.”
By Marilyn Bechtel
Source
Progressive Activists Keep Up Campaign to Thwart Rate Rises
NEW YORK—A group of activists lobbying the Federal Reserve to hold off on raising interest rates is pressing its...
NEW YORK—A group of activists lobbying the Federal Reserve to hold off on raising interest rates is pressing its campaign amid signs from the central bank that it is moving closer to lifting borrowing costs.
Members of the Fed Up Coalition, a left-leaning organization affiliated with the Center for Popular Democracy and connected with labor unions and community groups, met with Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen and other central bank governors late last year.
They recently have met with the leaders of the Boston, Kansas City and San Francisco Fed banks, and are scheduled to meet next with Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockharton Aug. 12 and with New York Fed President William Dudley on Aug. 14.
Most Fed officials, including Ms. Yellen, have indicated they expect to start raising short-term interest rates this year if the economy keeps improving. They have held their benchmark rate near zero since December 2008 to bolster the economy.
The activists say they want the Fed to hold off a bit longer to ensure the expansion benefits all Americans, not just the wealthiest.
They also want the Fed to become more open about its actions and how it selects the presidents of the 12 regional reserve banks.
And they want the Fed to engage with banks to promote affordable housing.
“Over the last few weeks we’ve had a lot of success engaging with Fed officials,” said Ady Barkan, who leads the Center for Popular Democracy Fed campaign. His group is “seeing that [Fed officials] are really being responsive” to the case they are making, he said.
Mr. Barkan said a recent meeting with St. Louis Fed President James Bullard was particularly fruitful. Mr. Bullard said in an interview with the Journal Friday the Fed has a balancing act when it comes to setting interest rate policy.
He favors raising interest rates this year and says the central bank’s September meeting is likely a good time to start.
“I think I have the better policy for the type of people they want to help,” Mr. Bullard said. “If you go for too much in monetary policy you can get some sort of financial bubbles and imbalances that fall apart and cause a recession,” and modest rate rises soon will help reduce those risks.
The activist group also is calling for greater representation on regional banks’ boards of directors for noncorporate interests. By law, the regional Fed directors are drawn from a mix of financial industry professionals, community and business leaders. Each board oversees individual reserve bank operations, and the directors from outside the financial sector manage the selection of new reserve bank presidents.
Mr. Barkan said Fed boards are dominated by the perspectives of leaders from large institutions. While he welcomes union and nonprofit representation on the boards, Mr. Barkan said the diversity should extend further and include a more ground-level perspective on how the economy is functioning.
Jean-Andre Sassine, age 48, of New York City, plans to attend the group’s meeting with Mr. Dudley. Mr. Sassine, who said he works on television and advertising productions, became interested in the Fed when his family ran into difficulties during the recession. He said that led him to ask questions about the role the central bank was playing to help everyday people.
When he went with the group to the meeting with Ms. Yellen, Mr. Sassine said he walked away with “the sense they aren’t used to dealing with people. It seems like they just get reports” and work off that data, and little else, to make their decisions, Mr. Sassine said.
“We are supposed to have input and recognition and we don’t have it,” Mr. Sassine said. “It can’t all be corporate heads and bankers…We’ve got to have real people who buy groceries” on the Fed’s various advisory boards, he said.
The Fed has tried to broaden its public outreach in recent years. The central bank this year has been recruiting people to serve on a new Community Advisory Council, which will meet twice a year with Washington-based Fed governors. Ms. Yellen last year visited a job-training program in Chicago and a nonprofit in Chelsea, Mass., that helps unemployed people find work.
Mr. Dudley has conducted a number of public tours of the New York Fed’s district, in which he has met with business leaders, academics, community groups and others. In a Wall Street Journal interview in March 2014 he explained he had been using the tours to make the Fed seem less abstract. And he also said the visits had in particular deepened his understanding of the housing crisis and sharpened his response to those troubles.
Staff at the regional Fed banks who have met with the activists say their meetings are part of regular efforts to engage with their communities, and can offer valuable insight into the state of the economy.
In a statement, the Atlanta Fed said it regularly meets with community based interest groups “through its various outreach programs including community and economic development, economic education, and supervision and regulation.”
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Protesters Demand a Voice in Selection of Next President of Philadelphia ‘Fed’
CBS Philly - December 15, 2014, by Steve Tawa - Just as the Federal Reserve is about to hold a key policy meeting in...
CBS Philly - December 15, 2014, by Steve Tawa - Just as the Federal Reserve is about to hold a key policy meeting in Washington, DC, a group of activists is calling for a more transparent process to replace Charles Plosser, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
The group, which staged a march this morning from Independence Hall to the Federal Reserve at Sixth and Arch Streets, says the Fed’s replacement process is dominated by major financial firms and corporations.
Members of Action United, the Philadelphia Unemployment Project, and Pennsylvania Working Families say there are no community, labor, or consumer representatives on the board of directors of the Philadelphia Fed, so working folks are shut out of the process.
They are part of a grass-roots coalition across the country that met last month with Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen, demanding that the central bank hear the concerns of ordinary Americans as it prepares to raise interest rates.
Who are those ordinary Americans?
“The unemployed, the underemployed, the working and barely-working working class,” says Kendra Brooks of Action United.
“We just need some people at the Fed to step up and pay attention to us,” adds Chris Campbell (far right in photo), a graduate of Orleans Technical Institute who has been doing multiple odd jobs to scrape together income.
Dawn Walton, who had been one day away from becoming a permanent worker with benefits at a local auto dealership when she was laid off after 89 days, said, “And now (we’re) out here pounding the pavement with millions of other people. It looks like there’s no way out.”
While the unemployment rate has declined to a six-year low, the activists challenge the Fed to visit poorer neighborhoods in Philadelphia and elsewhere before raising rates, because many are not experiencing a recovery.
Plosser, the Philadelphia Fed president since 2006, was among those known as a “hawk” for casting dissenting votes against the Fed’s prolonged low-rates policies.
The Philadelphia Fed says it is following a process for the selection of the bank’s next president outlined by Congress, and its senior executives have met with representatives of groups who have expressed interest in the process.
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