From a Contentious Election to a Stronger Democracy
From a Contentious Election to a Stronger Democracy
Reviving our democracy will be a paramount challenge for the new administration. The intertwined issues of race,...
Reviving our democracy will be a paramount challenge for the new administration. The intertwined issues of race, inequality, and democracy have been at the center of the 2016 campaign. Hillary Clinton put it well at the Democratic National Convention in July: “Our economy isn’t working the way it should because our democracy isn’t working the way it should.” The close primary challenge to Clinton by Senator Bernie Sanders was driven by the widespread feeling that big money is crowding out the voices and views of the people. Fights over voting rights have roiled states around the country. And in a perverted way, these issues have fed Donald Trump’s appeal, too. Many Americans feel unheard and unrepresented. Trump conflates real issues of the dominance of money with the paranoid message that voter registration and voting tallies are “rigged” as well.
Fifteen years ago, in the wake of the debacle election of 2000, The American Prospect published a special report entitled “Democracy’s Moment.” Today is another such moment, when we urgently need to reclaim our democracy in order to restore both the legitimacy of government and its capacity to solve problems. But the promise of democratic revival will be realized only if an effective fight is made. That will require serious presidential leadership, congressional courage, state and municipal experimentation, real change in the Democratic Party, and, most of all, the active engagement and sustained pressure of an organized democracy movement.
At the center of these efforts are three key areas: the need for expanding access to registration and voting; measures to keep money from crowding out citizens’ voices; and reforming gerrymandering and redistricting. These are not just “good government” or “process” issues. They are intimately connected to the ability of government to engage citizens and solve problems.
Reclaiming our democracy is connected to achieving real debate and progress on key substantive issues.
Reclaiming our democracy is connected to achieving real debate and progress on key substantive issues. These include raising the economic floor, protecting and rebuilding the middle class, crafting inclusive immigration policies, making college truly affordable, winning police and criminal justice reform, addressing the consequences of globalization, and protecting our planet. If politics can be about these deeply felt issues, people will be less cynical about democracy and government, and more willing to participate. In turn, the increased participation made possible by making the process more accessible, less manipulated, and less dominated by big money will dramatically change the dynamics of issues as well as elections, and enable far more substantive victories going forward.
I. Fighting Voter Suppression and Expanding Access
Immediately after the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision in 2013, which overturned federal preclearance authority for voting-system changes in jurisdictions with records of discrimination, almost every state previously covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act raced to put voting restrictions in place that made it harder for communities of color, poor people, and young people to vote. In the name of “preventing fraud,” and even of saving money, restrictive measures were successfully passed in 22 states.
Since then, hard-fought political and judicial fights have been waged. While the terrain is still sharply contested, important victories have been won in preventing these suppressive practices from being fully implemented. One emblematic fight was in Alabama, where the legislature passed a strict photo-ID requirement for voter registration and the Motor Vehicles Department closed down almost all of its offices as a “cost-saving measure.” The fight ensued, and the state reopened most sites, but on a more limited basis. In North Carolina, the omnibus voter-suppression law passed in 2013 has been rolled back in court, provision by provision, in rulings by the Fourth Circuit that were recently affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Cynical purging of voter rolls is a problem in several states. In Georgia, Ohio, and Virginia, lawsuits by Dēmos and Common Cause are in process, challenging aggressive purging procedures employed by secretaries of state, which erase hundreds of thousands of potentially eligible people from the rolls and violate National Voter Registration Act requirements. In Georgia, between October 2012 and November 2014, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp purged more than 370,000 voters from the rolls for failure to vote, a number that far exceeded the number of all new voters registered. In Ohio, Secretary of State Jon Husted purged 144,000 voters from the state’s three largest counties in 2015. (On September 23, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down this purge as violating the National Voter Registration Act.)
Even when they are not manipulated for partisan purposes, voting systems in many states are outmoded, inefficient, and underfunded—and vulnerable to attack. Improving administration and coordination, and winning stronger standards and enforcement, is less sexy but really important. When the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was passed in 2002, the Election Assistance Commission (no authority in that title!) was designed to be weak, and partisan obstructionism over recent years has rendered it virtually useless. States have found ways to cooperate, such as through the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC). But there is a desperate need for national standards, for new investments in voting machines and technologies, better training and pay for poll workers, all with absolute safeguards against hacking and fraud. The issues now arising about the potential for sophisticated foreign hacking should force far more attention to these administrative security issues, and also be the pivot to open a real discussion of professionalizing and standardizing our elections, as well as protecting them from electronic attack.
As these fights over voter suppression in the states have raged, Republicans in Congress have refused even to hold hearings on restoring the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. This is a turnaround by House and Senate Republicans on the law. In the VRA’s most recent reauthorization, in 2006, the Voting Rights Act passed 98–0 in the U.S. Senate, 390–33 in the House, and was signed into law by then-President George W. Bush. Better than almost anything, this shift shows the need for a major push on a Democracy Agenda in 2017.
However, the struggles on the state level have not been only defensive. There is an affirmative voting-access agenda as well—real reforms have been achieved, and significant groundwork has been laid for dramatic advancements in the future.
Expanding Voter Registration. Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia have adopted online registration, often with bipartisan support. Same-day registration, which has been shown to increase participation by 5 percent to 7 percent, is now law in 13 states and the District of Columbia. In three other states—California, Hawaii, and Vermont—the law has been passed but not yet implemented. In North Carolina, the attempt to rescind same-day registration has been one of the policies blocked by recent court actions. Preregistration of 16- and 17-year-olds brings young people into the system so they can be prepared to vote at 18, and more than half the country now offers the reform, in red and blue states alike.
Restoring Voting Rights. Significant progress has been made in several states toward restoring the voting rights of citizens with felony convictions. Maryland last year passed legislation restoring the right to vote to individuals upon completion of prison sentences, without having to wait until after probation or parole. When Governor Larry Hogan vetoed the bill, the House and Senate overrode him in February, restoring the voting rights of 40,000 people. In Virginia, despite strong opposition, Governor Terry McAuliffe recently restored the rights of 13,000 people, as the beginning of a larger process.
Expanding the Use of the NVRA. One creative approach has been the use by advocates of the provisions of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA, often called “Motor Voter”), which requires state agencies—not just DMVs, but all agencies that offer federal benefits—to affirmatively offer people voter registration. De¯mos and Project Vote have led efforts to push state agencies to do their job, and more than three million additional voters have been registered at social-service agencies in 16 states that have changed their procedures, with the biggest gains being in Missouri and Ohio.
Automatic Voter Registration. AVR is a process in which the state, through state agencies (DMVs for now, but potentially others as well), places eligible voters automatically on the rolls. Oregon first passed the reform in March of 2015, and roughly 12,000 new voters per month have been added to the rolls—three times the registration rate before the state adopted AVR. California quickly followed Oregon, and Vermont, West Virginia, and Connecticut (by administrative order) have since adopted it, with some variations. The Illinois legislature passed AVR with strong bipartisan support just this May, but Governor Bruce Rauner vetoed the bill. With an override unlikely, advocates are uniting behind an effort for a veto-proof majority in 2017.
Expanding Early and Mail-in Voting. Early-voting opportunities have expanded significantly, and are now practiced in most states, either in precincts or at central vote centers. Voting by mail has been expanded as well. Both Washington and Oregon have gone almost exclusively to mail-in ballots, and Maryland recently expanded both mail-in and early-voting options. Colorado has built one of the most expansive systems, offering mail-in and early voting, with same-day registration available as well.
II. Fixing the Rigged System of Money in Politics
Despite the obvious and profound negative effects of our campaign-finance system, efforts to change the way money operates in our politics have been stymied at almost every turn. The campaign finance laws created after Watergate held for a while. But over the last 40 years, they have been undercut by a conservative legislative offensive, a relentless legal assault, terrible rulings from the Roberts Court, skillful evasion, partisan gridlock, and bipartisan political resistance at the state and national levels. Even though there is agreement among large majorities of voters of all party affiliations on the magnitude and impact of the problem, this has not produced the political will for the kind of major change that is needed.
Small-Donor Matching. Despite the money-is-speech doctrine, real gains can and have been made at the state and local level, mainly through systems of small-donor public financing. Maine, Arizona, and Connecticut, along with such cities as New York, Los Angeles, and Albuquerque, have succeeded in winning reforms that reduce or end reliance on the traditional donor class. Recently, reform coalitions have won new small-donor systems in Seattle and Montgomery County, Maryland. There are ballot initiatives set this November for Washington state, South Dakota, and Howard County, Maryland, and a successful advisory referendum in Chicago in February has set up the possibility for progress there.
These systems have been shown to produce real change. In Connecticut, whose system was adopted in 2005 and has been in place since the 2008 election cycle, candidates for governor, other state offices, and the legislature who opt in to the voluntary system raise a threshold amount in small donations, and then stop fundraising altogether, utilizing a state grant sufficient to run a serious campaign. Participation rates by Republicans and Democrats alike are very high—almost 75 percent in 2016—and there is strong bipartisan consensus that the system has been successful in changing how campaigns are run and—importantly—who can seriously contemplate running. It has also dramatically reduced the role of lobbyists, bundlers, and other moneyed players who traditionally dominated the halls of the State Capitol in Hartford.
In New York City, a strong matching program (6 to 1 for qualifying donations raised by candidates) coupled with term limits has been a powerful engine for change. It allowed a diverse and energetic pool of candidates to emerge, and set the stage for significant progressive victories at the city council and mayoral level. Efforts to expand the system statewide have so far met stiff resistance in the Republican Senate, but the expansion effort continues while the city system enjoys strong popular support.
The Courts and a New Jurisprudence. This is where major change could really begin. The new president will likely have multiple appointments to the Supreme Court. A new high court, looking objectively at what has happened to campaign spending and fundraising in the real world, could reverse the Citizens United and McCutcheon cases, and could and should go back to the original fundamentally flawed ruling in Buckley v. Valeo from 1976. That ruling laid down two horrible premises. First, that campaign spending is constitutionally protected speech. And second, that the only acceptable principle for limiting campaign spending is to prevent corruption or the appearance of corruption.
But there is an obvious additional principle that is simple common sense, which is that a set of rules can be adopted and justified to ensure that every voice is heard in our democracy, not just ones that can buy the biggest bullhorn.
But there is an obvious additional principle that is simple common sense, which is that a set of rules can be adopted and justified to ensure that every voice is heard in our democracy, not just ones that can buy the biggest bullhorn. Laws based on this equity principle could be passed, and cases can be developed and brought as assiduously and strategically as those on the right have done in their pro-big-money crusade. If judges are chosen and confirmed who prioritize restoring democracy, a major shift can happen without a constitutional amendment. They need only read retired Justice John Paul Stevens’s testimony to Congress in April 2014:
For years the Court’s campaign finance jurisprudence has been incorrectly predicated on the assumption that avoiding corruption or the appearance of corruption is the only justification for regulating campaign speech and the financing of political campaigns. That is quite wrong. … Like rules that govern athletic contests or adversary litigation, those rules should create a level playing field. … Just as procedures in contested litigation regulate speech in order to give adversary parties a fair and equal opportunity to persuade the decision-maker to rule in their favor, rules regulating political campaigns should have the same objective.
Disclosure. In addition to small-donor public financing, the voluntary nature of which abides by the Buckley and the Citizens United decisions, another set of reforms has expanded disclosure, to stem the tide of money from unrevealed and secret sources and shine the proverbial sunlight on how campaigns are paid for. Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, and Colorado are among states that have strengthened their disclosure requirements.
Federal Reforms. Several pieces of reform legislation have been introduced in Congress. These have been stymied by Republican control of both houses, but that could soon change (see below).
III. Ending Gerrymandering and Fair Redistricting
In congressional delegations and many state legislatures, the partisan breakdown bears little resemblance to voter preferences. While it is difficult to argue exact correlations between craven district-drawing and the gap between the congressional party vote and the congressional delegation makeup (given unopposed races and other factors), the general relationship is very clear. In Pennsylvania, where Democrats received half the votes for Congress in 2012, the congressional delegation to the House is 13–5 Republican. In Michigan, the Democratic vote was more than 50 percent, and it is Republican by a 9–5 margin. In Florida, where Democrats received 45 percent of the vote, the delegation is Republican by 17 to 10. In Virginia, the vote was nearly half Democratic, while the congressional delegation is 8 to 3. And in North Carolina, the Democratic vote was more than half, and the delegation is 10 to 3. While this is not only a Republican offense (in Maryland, Democrats got 63 percent of the congressional vote, but the delegation is 7–1 Democratic), the preponderance of major recent examples are of Republican making. These are remarkable disparities, and similar ones can be shown for state legislative representation. (It is worth noting that in North Carolina in 2014, about half of the state legislative candidates ran unopposed.)
While scholars have pointed out that the country is re-segregating in its residential patterns, numbers this large can only be the result of conscious racial and partisan intent.
While scholars have pointed out that the country is re-segregating in its residential patterns, numbers this large can only be the result of conscious racial and partisan intent. And whereas gerrymandering once was a gentlemanly, bipartisan arrangement to protect incumbency, the more recent abuses have been to ensure partisan control of legislatures and to create absurd and permanent majorities in congressional delegations that do not reflect the state’s voting preferences by a long shot. The outcome was a direct result of “Operation REDMAP,” a successful Republican plan to target legislative races in 2010, specifically to ensure control of the redistricting process.
This kind of gerrymandering isn’t only about politics; it is also about race. The most egregious abuses are accomplished by “packing” and “cracking” black and Latino voters, either by putting them into very compact districts, or by spreading them across multiple districts while at the same time ensuring white and conservative dominance. Ironically, the defense of the redistricting plans most often offered is that they are not about race, but about partisan preferences. These are intertwined and unacceptable goals, both. In addition, the counting of prisoners as “residents” of rural districts where prisons are placed, rather than from the communities where they lived before their incarceration, is, given the racially skewed prison population, another way of limiting the power of communities of color. Again, some progress has been made recently, with states including California, Delaware, New York, and Maryland changing the way prisoners’ residence will be counted.
The good news on gerrymandering overall is that citizens around the country have been fighting back. Recent cases have been fought and mostly won in states as diverse as Alabama, Maryland, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Florida.
Florida produced a major victory after a long fight when the state supreme court, generally regarded as conservative, ruled in 2015 that blatant partisan gerrymandering violated the state constitution, and required new districts to be drawn. This year, all of Florida’s districts have new boundaries, and significantly more are competitive. The number of competitive congressional seats rose from ten to 14, and in the State Senate, competitive seats rose from 14 to 20. In addition, districts are far more compact, adhere better to existing geographical boundaries, and give communities of color enhanced opportunities to elect candidates of their choosing.
In North Carolina, the courts have required congressional and state legislative maps to be redrawn this year to reduce the racially discriminatory districting process. When the legislature drew the new maps, they assured the public that the new maps, which would retain the 10–3 Republican majority in that state’s congressional delegation, were not racially motivated, but rather based on partisan considerations. The maps are now being contested by Common Cause and others in a new lawsuit.
In addition to the court cases, efforts to form independent redistricting commissions have been gaining steam. Arizona and California led the way years ago, in California through a ballot initiative for an independent Citizen Redistricting Commission to draw the lines. The results have been a legislature and congressional campaigns that are both more competitive and more reflective of the state’s population than ever before. And the Supreme Court last year upheld the Arizona Redistricting Commission against an argument from Arizona legislators that the citizens had “usurped” power from the legislature. Another approach, utilized by Iowa for a number of years, gives power to nonpartisan legislative staff to draw the districts with the assistance of a citizen advisory commission. The legislature can veto a plan, but cannot make changes.
In addition to changing who draws the district lines, a second area for reform is the question of what criteria to use. Criteria that have been proposed by reformers include: keeping communities of interest together, expressly protecting the rights of communities of color to have opportunities to elect candidates of their choice; prohibiting favoritism for incumbency or party advantage; requiring districts to be compact and contiguous; keeping cities and counties whole; and potentially even requiring districts to be politically competitive. In Florida, the key to the success of the reform community in the court victories was a constitutional amendment adopted in 2010 that prohibited drawing districts that diminished the ability of minority voters to elect representatives of their choice, or plans designed for partisan advantage. Secondary standards included compactness, contiguity, and equality of population.
In Ohio, a rare bipartisan coalition supported a successful ballot initiative last November that prohibited the drawing of state House and Senate districts for political advantage, and added protections that will prevent one party from dominating the process. The vote was more than two to one, and advocates will continue to push to add congressional districts to those covered by the new law. In North Carolina, following the court victories, the End Gerrymandering Now coalition, with strong bipartisan support, including in the much maligned North Carolina legislature, has real possibilities for victory in the next year. In Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Missouri, efforts are afoot to enact fair redistricting criteria as well.
On gerrymandering, too, a federal approach is needed.
On gerrymandering, too, a federal approach is needed. The Redistricting Reform Act, sponsored by Representative Zoe Lofgren based on California’s experience, sets standards and mandates independent commissions for the drawing of districts. The Voting Rights Act could be effectively used to win fair districts free of racial bias, if it were reauthorized. And, looking at the Supreme Court, there are four cases (Harris v. McCrory in North Carolina; Whitford v. Nichol in Wisconsin; Shapiro v. McManus in Maryland; and Common Cause v. Rucho in North Carolina) that could clearly be headed to the Court. The Court upheld the Arizona process, but it needs to take a step further, using one or more of these cases, and give critical guidance to states around the country as they develop their redistricting plans after the 2020 census.
What It Will Take to Win
Policy ideas are critical, but without a political strategy, they can just be words on paper. And saying we need a strategy is very different than really developing a successful one. Here are some of the keys to success.
I. Presidential Leadership
Hillary Clinton, strongly influenced by the Sanders campaign and by democracy organizations, has stated strong support for voting rights and for changing the campaign-finance system. But she will need to prioritize democracy issues with a serious focus, and it will not be easy. On the one hand, there is clear public support for all these issues, which resonate with voters who believe the system is stacked, and that their voices don’t count. With voters of color in particular, there are decades experiencing active attempts to keep them away from the polls and to minimize their representation through racially based gerrymandering.
On the other hand, there will be major countervailing pulls. There will be the press of crises, foreign and domestic. There will be the demands of other major issues and constituencies whose issues have been unable to move for so long. And there will be the lure of opportunities for unlimited and interested fundraising, and doing political business as usual. Pay-to-play politics is so deeply ingrained in our political culture that breaking free from it would be an extraordinary challenge and accomplishment.
What would real presidential leadership look like? One major marker is sustained attention by the president and consistent talk about these issues, utilizing the presidential pulpit in her inauguration speech, in her travels around the country, and in her legislative priorities. But what are other concrete steps that can be taken?
The President and the Congress. Legislatively, there are a number of important pro-democracy possibilities. If the Senate turns Democratic, there is real potential. Senators Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, and others all have real commitments to a democracy agenda. The dynamics in the House are far less predictable, but even if it remains in Republican hands, there may be some real opportunity in the unsettled post-election months.
First and foremost should be moving the Voting Rights Advancement Act, sponsored by Representative John Lewis and Senator Leahy. Nothing would bring the Democratic Party together in the Congress, and send a signal that the issues of race and representation will not be afterthoughts, more forcefully than this. In addition, moving the bill would call out the Republicans, particularly the House leadership, to demonstrate that the racism so shamefully present in this year’s presidential campaign does not represent Republicanism in this new moment. Speaker Paul Ryan, James Sensenbrenner, Tom Cole, and other House Republicans have stated publicly that they support restoring the Voting Rights Act. Yet they have caved to the right wing of the caucus. House Judiciary Chair Robert Goodlatte refused to hold a committee hearing on its restoration, perhaps to appease the Tea Party and white nationalist elements of his Roanoke-area district. Will this pattern simply continue, or might this be an opportunity to lead in a different way? And if the leadership can’t or won’t move, this would seem to be a perfect vehicle for a discharge petition that might alter the voting dynamic in the House in major ways.
In a similar vein is the Democracy Restoration Act, which would require restoration of the voting rights of citizens with felony convictions upon release from prison. This could affect several million people around the country, and connects to the momentum on criminal justice reform, an issue already with bipartisan support.
On the campaign-finance side, Democratic senators this year introduced the “We the People” package of reforms, which Hillary Clinton said she supports. It includes strengthening disclosure and lobbyist reporting and revolving-door provisions, reforming the Federal Election Commission, and introducing a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. Unfortunately, the package did not include a small donor–based public financing system for Congress. But the Durbin bill in the Senate (the Fair Elections Now Act) and the John Sarbanes bill in the House (Government by the People Act) create, in slightly different ways, such a system for congressional races. In addition, the Tom Udall-sponsored EMPOWER Act would restore the viability of the presidential public financing system. As of now, these bills have very little Republican support, and will be far more challenging to move than the Voting Rights Advancement Act. But the situation has gotten so clearly out of hand, and there is such strong support from voters across the spectrum, that it may be possible that with both presidential and congressional leadership, a new chemistry on the issue can be developed, at least enough to make the debate serious.
It seems as though this election season has shown the wisdom of clearly standing for the 99 percent, and for strengthening the Democratic Party’s commitment to fighting for racial and economic equity.
One important question the campaign-finance issue raises is where the Democratic Party wants to be on these fundamental issues of how the system runs. The Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Democracy Restoration Act have a very clear logic to them from Democrats’ political point of view. Fighting for an expanded electorate, increasing the representation of the new American majority, and opposing the forces of reaction on racial issues are clearly enough in the party’s self-interest. Even the restoration of voting rights for people with felony convictions, though it might have raised the specter of being “soft on crime” at one point, has moved into the Democrats’ advantage zone. But the issue of really changing the campaign-finance rules, like the issue of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the rules of globalization, goes to the heart of what the Democratic Party stands for, and risks raising the old progressive-versus-Democratic Leadership Council conflicts that were so central to the Bill Clinton era. It seems as though this election season has shown the wisdom of clearly standing for the 99 percent, and for strengthening the Democratic Party’s commitment to fighting for racial and economic equity. But the pulls of the business lobby and the donor class will be a powerful siren call.
Executive Actions. There are a large number of executive orders, appointments, and other actions that could be taken by the president.
An executive order could require federal contractors to disclose their political contributions, which would have a major impact, since most of America’s largest corporations have federal contracts. This has been discussed at great length with the Obama White House, but has not been done. Such an order would dovetail well with a strong order on ethics and revolving doors.
The president has the authority to mandate that exchanges under the Affordable Care Act be designated as voter registration sites under the NVRA, and to consider other potential strengthening of NVRA provisions.
The president and Congress need to make sure that the 2020 census is adequately funded so that a full count of our diverse population can truly be made. And the census must count prisoners from the communities from which they come, and not from their involuntary rural addresses.
The Justice Department has a strikingly important role to play. Obama has ramped up the intensity and performance of the department’s Civil Rights Division in challenging voter-suppression efforts in states and municipalities, through Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. President Hillary Clinton could go even further. The DOJ has had limited involvement in challenging purging procedures that violate the NVRA and in enforcing other NVRA provisions, which could have a major impact on the voting rolls, including ensuring that state agencies are doing all they should. And the DOJ should maintain regular, consistent contact with civil-rights organizations and the democracy community overall.
Appointments to key positions will also have a major impact. While major attention has been paid to the importance of potential Supreme Court appointments, the appointment of judges in other jurisdictions could be instrumental in rewriting jurisprudence on campaign finance and in protecting the right to vote. And President Clinton’s appointments, not only to the FEC but to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Internal Revenue Service, will all have major bearing on issues related to disclosure and political financing in general.
All of these actions would benefit tremendously if President Clinton were to create a serious program within the Domestic Policy Council to move a democracy agenda. It would be a critical boost to moving a legislative agenda and promoting its priority. It would also be an effective focal point for organizing the strategic elements of support for a multifaceted democracy agenda—cataloguing and promoting the variety of executive actions that could be taken, and coordinating with the broad range of constituency organizations and coalitions that have taken up democracy as a top-priority issue. Overall, it would be an effective and strategic way of demonstrating and concretizing presidential leadership.
II. States as Continuing Laboratories
Republicans hold 68 of 99 legislative chambers, and fully control redistricting in 18 states.
Beyond change at the federal level should Clinton be successful and gains are made at the congressional level, there will also be new opportunities for states to play their “laboratories of democracy” role. Republicans hold 68 of 99 legislative chambers, and fully control redistricting in 18 states. But there are 11 states where Democrats have the possibility of retaking control, including six Senate chambers—Colorado, Nevada, Virginia, New York, Washington, and West Virginia—where a shift of one seat would flip control, opening up possibilities on democracy issues as well as others.
New York is a very clear case in point. Over the last several years, a broad and strong coalition, led by Citizen Action of New York, Common Cause New York, major unions, and the Working Families Party, fought for a strong small-donor public financing system at the state level, modeled after the New York City program. The effort had strong legislative champions and passed the state Assembly. While the governor was the most unreliable of allies, the pivotal barrier was the Republican control of the New York State Senate, which is now evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. A major victory by Clinton could very possibly flip the Senate to Democratic control, which would give a major boost to the “Demand Democracy” campaign that is poised to renew its efforts in 2017. Given New York’s outsized role in national campaign finance, a victory there could have significant national implications.
III. Now More Than Ever, a Democracy Movement
Over the past decade, we have seen the intensification of strong grassroots action for democracy. To have any real hope that the president, Congress, state legislatures, the Democratic Party, and others will move these agenda items, there must be outside pressure, with real people, real numbers, and strong organizational coordination. Based on a number of developments, there is real hope that this can happen.
New social movements, organizations committed to fighting for racial equity, and organizations in the movement for immigrant inclusion have strongly connected to democracy and voting issues. For instance, the recent “Vision for Black Lives” platform adopted by Black Lives Matter and associated organizations strongly supported not only voting rights but also publicly financed elections. Organizations and movements that have not always given priority to democratic reforms, including the labor and environmental movements, have realized that democracy must be restored and enlivened if their issues are to have a real chance to win. Grassroots community and citizen organizations like People’s Action, PICO National Network, the Center for Popular Democracy, and the Gamaliel Foundation network have added these issues to their agendas more than ever before.
In addition, coordination among established organizations, and newer ones, in the money-in-politics field, the redistricting field, and in the voting-rights field has strengthened significantly over the last several years. This year’s combined effort under the banner of “Fighting Big Money,” led by Every Voice, Common Cause, Public Citizen, and others, has been a successful example, as were Democracy Spring and the Democracy Awakening. Civil-rights and voting-rights organizations, including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Advancement Project, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, have worked well in a coordinated way to stand up to the onrush of voter suppression. And the Democracy Initiative, with 60 organizations from all of these issue areas, is an entity solely committed to advancing this collaboration.
And, of course, the Sanders campaign mobilized tens of thousands of activists and influenced millions of people on the connected issues of economic and political inequality, and highlighted the assaults on our democracy in a way that energized the fight for reform. The campaign’s offshoot, Our Revolution, will certainly be in this fight as well.
The key will be in building a coordinated campaign for democracy that has the breadth of issue makeup, the diversity of organizations, and the ability to coordinate and move effectively together on behalf of the Democracy Agenda. Racial justice, economic equity, and real democracy are inextricably intertwined, and the movements to achieve them will need to consistently make those links clear, and work together to move the president and Congress on all three in reciprocal ways. The movement will need a federal focus and a state focus, and will need to recognize that focusing on policy wins in the short term is essential, while continuously bearing in mind that these issues need to be made front and center for candidates running in the 2018 election as well. Candidates for office need to win or lose based on their commitment to these issues, and electing champions for democracy will be a critical component of the work ahead. All the while, the movement will need to be looking further ahead to the incredibly consequential election of 2020.
This election has the potential to open up an extraordinary moment in the life of our democracy, including in the way we practice democracy itself. Or it can be another missed opportunity, superseded by other issues and undone by a failure to creatively assemble the elements necessary to win and coordinate them in the most effective and inclusive ways. The elements for success are present in extremely propitious ways, but it will take determined leadership by the president, congressional leaders, state legislatures, and a real grassroots movement to seize this new Democracy Moment. If it can be done, the benefits of fighting and winning on these issues now will reverberate for a long time to come.
By Miles Rapoport
Source
The End of On-Call Scheduling?
Retailers have been ...
Retailers have been under intense pressure from labor groups, regulators, and their own employees to end on-call scheduling—the practice in which shift workers are called to work on short notice, and are often uncompensated if it turns out to be a slow day. On Friday, New York attorney-general Eric Schneiderman’s office announced that J.Crew will end on-call scheduling nationwide this month. The retailer joins Urban Outfitters, Abercrombie & Fitch, Bath & Body Works, Gap, and Victoria’s Secret, which all have announced changes since Schneiderman’s office launched an inquiry into the practice at over a dozen companies.
“After discussion with my office, J. Crew has agreed to end on-call shifts nationwide and to provide one week of advance notice about schedules to employees at all New York store locations,” said Schneiderman in a statement. “Workers deserve protections that allow them to have a reliable schedule in order to arrange for transportation to work, to accommodate child-care needs, and to budget their family finances.”
This is the sixth agreement Schneiderman has reached with a major retailer. In April, the New York attorney-general’s office sent letters to 13 retailers asking for information regarding their scheduling policies: “We have been informed that a number of companies in New York State utilize on-call shifts and require employees to report in some manner, whether by phone, text message, or email, before the designated shift in order to learn whether their services are ultimately needed on-site that day,” said the letter.
The letter expresses concern that the practice might be in violation of a state regulation that employees who report for work must be paid for at least four hours (or the number of hours in a regular shift) of work. It cites the financial and personal strains for workers without predictable schedules—from being unable to work another job or attend school, to the strains of finding childcare last minute. Further, a report by the Economic Policy Institute found that the lowest income workers face the most irregular work schedules.
A spokesperson for Gap Inc. confirmed that all five brands—The Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy, Intermix, and Athleta—has phased out on-call scheduling globally by the end of September.* L Brand—the parent company for Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works—also confirmed that they have ended the practice nationwide.
Gap is also working on a pilot project with Joan Williams, a professor and director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California Hastings College of Law, and Susan Lambert, a professor at the University of Chicago who studies scheduling issues, on new ways to stabilize worker schedules. Lambert’s researchfound that 64 percent of food-service workers and half of retail workers receive less than a week’s notice for shifts.
For now, the shift away from on-call scheduling seems to be only gaining momentum: Earlier this week, Forever 21 was hit with a lawsuit from a former employee over unpaid on-call scheduling. And, for the seven remaining companies that Schneiderman’s office contacted (the identities of which are unknown), such momentum may soon be overpowering.
Source: The Atlantic
One ex-banker's built-in advantage in the Fed chair race: Family ties to Trump
One ex-banker's built-in advantage in the Fed chair race: Family ties to Trump
With Gary Cohn’s chances of becoming chairman of the Federal Reserve diminished, another former banker is waiting in...
With Gary Cohn’s chances of becoming chairman of the Federal Reserve diminished, another former banker is waiting in the wings for the coveted post: Kevin Warsh.
A veteran of both the central bank and Wall Street, Warsh is already high on the White House’s list of possible successors to Fed Chair Janet Yellen. But he has an enviable reference: his billionaire father-in-law, who met Donald Trump in college and is a confidant to this day.
Read the full article here.
Elizabeth Warren, Workers Take Aim at ‘Walmart Economy’
RH Reality Check - November 19, 2014, by Emily Crockett - When Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. George Miller (D-...
RH Reality Check - November 19, 2014, by Emily Crockett - When Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. George Miller (D-CA) invited Walmart workers to brief Congress on Tuesday about the retail giant’s abusive practices, the conversation was about more than just Walmart.
“No one in this country should work full-time and still live in poverty,” Warren said.
“This is about the simple dignity of the people you have hired to work,” Miller said. “When you have a higher minimum wage, fair scheduling, and equal work for equal pay, the perception of the business goes up in the people’s mind, the customers go up and the revenues go up.”
Cantare Duvant, a Walmart customer service manager, said at the briefing that since Walmart is the nation’s largest retailer, it sets the standard for others in the industry. “So not only do we as Walmart workers deserve better, our economy also deserves better,” she said.
Duvant is a member of OUR Walmart (Organization United for Respect at Walmart), a union-backed group of Walmart workers who are, in Duvant’s words, “struggling to support our families on low pay and erratic scheduling” in what is now “Walmart’s low-wage economy.”
“Walmart specifically is worth discussing not only because of the 1.3 million workers it directly employs, but also because of the impact its employment practices have on the rest of our economy,” said Amy Traub, senior policy analyst at Demos. She said Walmart does this by “pushing down wages, limited workers hours, and squeezing its suppliers and its competitors.”
A majority of Americans are paid by the hour, and about half of early-career adults have no say in their work schedules, said Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy. “This isn’t just a narrow section of people,” she said.
Sen. Warren, a progressive hero who was recently appointed to a position in the Senate Democratic leadership, said that the issue of low-wage work in America is “deeply personal” for her.
When her father lost his job after having a heart attack, Warren said, her working-class family couldn’t pay the bills, lost their car, and almost lost their home. Then one day, “My mother, who was 50 years old and had never worked outside the home, pulled on her best dress, put on her lipstick, put on her high heels, and walked to Sears to get a minimum-wage job.”
“But here’s the key: It was a minimum-wage job in an America where a minimum-wage job would support a family of three.”
That could never happen today, Warren said, when “a momma and a baby on a full-time minimum-wage job cannot keep themselves out of poverty.”
Warren used the briefing to promote three pieces of legislation aimed at helping low-wage workers, including but not limited to people working at Walmart.
Those bills would raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour, give workers more reliable and flexible schedules, and help women address unequal pay based on gender.
Equal pay came up because women make up about two-thirds of the low-wage work force, and many are family breadwinners. Warren said that women in about half of American jobs can be fired just for asking whether their pay is unequal to their male coworkers.
The Schedules That Work Act, Warren said, is about the “basic fairness” of workers being able to plan for a second job, child care, or schooling. It would require employers to give workers their schedules two weeks in advance, compensate them for showing up for work only to be sent home, and not retaliate against workers for requesting more flexible or predictable schedules.
All three bills have been blocked by Republicans, which Warren openly acknowledged.
“I know that change is not easy. We might not pass these bills right away,” she said. “But don’t kid yourself about the importance of these bills, and the assurance that we’re eventually going to get them through.”
The Schedules That Work Act in particular would help Fatmata Jabbie, a Walmart worker and refugee from Saudi Arabia whose story was read at the hearing.
“Although I am not full-time yet, I am virtually on call seven days a week to pick up extra hours,” she said in her written statement. Her reward for that trouble is usually only 30 to 36 hours of work and $150 to $200 in take-home pay.
“I am a mom with two beautiful children, so I am not the only one who relies on that salary to survive,” Jabbie said.
OUR Walmart is pushing for bigger reforms than the three bills Warren promoted though. Members of the group are calling for their aggressively non-unionized employer to pay a minimum living wage of $15 an hour, provide stable, full-time schedules, and stop retaliating against workers who speak out against the company’s practices.
Duvant, for instance, already makes the $10.10 per hour that the federal minimum wage bill would guarantee—but that doesn’t do her much good, she said, when Walmart will only schedule her for 16 hours of work per week.
And Evelin Cruz, who worked for Walmart for 11 years, said at the hearing that the company fired her a few weeks ago for her activism with OUR Walmart.
“We spoke out for change, and Walmart did what it does best, which is bully, retaliate, and fire me,” she said.
Cruz told RH Reality Check that even though she no longer works at Walmart and is looking for other work, she’ll keep up the fight with OUR Walmart.
“That’s what they count on, for people to be out of Walmart and no longer want to participate,” she said. “But this is an issue that is not only affecting people in Walmart. It’s a widespread problem of scheduling, lack of hours, and a minimum wage that you can’t survive on.”
Source
Demonstrators bring Dreamers, TPS cause to Trump’s doorstep
Demonstrators bring Dreamers, TPS cause to Trump’s doorstep
Several dozen demonstrators, organized by progressive groups and chanting in Spanish, brought the cause of the Dreamers...
Several dozen demonstrators, organized by progressive groups and chanting in Spanish, brought the cause of the Dreamers and Temporary Protected Status refugees—both groups targeted for eviction from the U.S. by Donald Trump—to the doorstep of the GOP president and his Republican backers on the evening of Feb. 1.
Read the full article here.
Warren allies demand answers from Clinton on Wall St. ties
“On behalf of our nine million supporters across the country, we are writing to request more information about your...
“On behalf of our nine million supporters across the country, we are writing to request more information about your positions regarding the revolving door between Wall Street and the federal government,” reads a statement backed by Democracy For America, Rootstrikers, CREDO Action, MoveOn.Org Political Action, the Center for Popular Democracy Action, The Other 98%, Friends of the Earth Action, and American Family Voices.
The missive, which comes as Clinton interrupts her Hamptons vacation to unveil her rural policy platform in Iowa on Wednesday, specifically notes that Clinton has yet to support or comment on Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s Financial Services Conflict of Interest Act. Progressive icon Sen. Elizabeth Warren — who has ties to many of those who signed the letter — has encouraged all presidential candidates to back the legislation, as both Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley have done.
“These types of ‘golden parachute’ compensation packages are highly controversial, and for good reason,” the letter reads. “At worst, it results in undue and inappropriate corporate influence at the highest levels of government — in essence, a barely legal, backdoor form of bribery.”
The letter concludes by posing two questions to the Democratic front-runner: “Do you still support the use of this controversial compensation practice?” and “If you become president, will you allow officials who enter your administration to receive this sort of bonus?”
While Clinton has made steps to appeal to the types of progressive voters behind this letter, she has so far resisted pressure from the left to support reviving the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial and investment banking before it was repealed in 1999. And members of these groups who wanted bank antagonist Warren to run for the presidency are on high alert this week after news broke that the Massachusetts senator met with Vice President Joe Biden over the weekend as he considers his own presidential ambitions.
“It’s hard to imagine Democrats’ 2016 nominee will be truly tough on Wall Street banks that break the law, if they won’t commit to banning their advisers from receiving legalized bribes from those same banks,” said Charles Chamberlain, executive director of Democracy for America, a group founded by former Vermont governor and current Clinton backer Howard Dean.
The letter names a pair of Clinton associates who moved from banks to the State Department: Robert Hormats, an undersecretary who came from Goldman Sachs, and Thomas Nides, a deputy secretary who came from Morgan Stanley.
Warren has suggested repeatedly that any candidate seeking her endorsement must agree not to appoint officials with Wall Street ties.
“Anyone who wants to be president should appoint only people who have already demonstrated they are independent, who have already demonstrated that they can hold giant banks accountable, who have already demonstrated that they embrace the kind of ambitious economic policies that we need to rebuild opportunity and a strong middle class in this country,” she said in July.
Source: Politico
The Fed’s Main Job Is Jobs, And A Coalition Plans To Keep It On Task
Campaign for America's Future - September 4, 2014, by Isaiah Poole - A lot of eyes will be on the Federal Reserve...
Campaign for America's Future - September 4, 2014, by Isaiah Poole - A lot of eyes will be on the Federal Reserve Friday when the Labor Department releases its August unemployment statistics. But where will the Fed’s eyes be focused? A group of activists are planning the next steps of their effort to keep the Fed focused on the continuing unemployment crisis, and keep the Fed from taking actions that will make things worse for millions still seeking work.
“We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us,” said Shawn Sebastian of the Center for Popular Democracy, who was part of a group of activists and unemployed people who confronted members of the Fed at last month’s economic summit in Jackson Hole, Wyo. That includes following up on a promise by Fed chair Janet Yellen to meet with the group in Washington and pressing a more detailed plan for how the Fed should proceed to help the Main Street economy grow.
“We are going to be looking at the full range of policy options,” Sebastian said.
The “inflation hawks” were poised to seize the narrative when the members of the Fed attended the Jackson Hole summit. These Fed members, egged on by conservative academics and policymakers, want the Fed to put the brakes on economic growth and turn its attention to fighting inflation, even though there are no signs that inflation is an imminent threat. On the contrary, wages as a percentage of economic output are at their lowest level since the late 1940s (while corporate profits as a share of the economy are at record highs), one sign that there are far more people looking for work than there are jobs for them.
What the hawks did not count on was the Center for Popular Democracy’s ragtag group of 10 unemployed people and activist supporters. They trekked to Jackson Hole to confront Fed members with their stories of struggling to find decent jobs, along with a demand that the Fed not abandon its unfinished role in rebuilding the middle-class economy, in the form of a letter endorsed by more than 70 organizations. Their biggest success, Sebastian said, was a two-hour meeting with Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank President Esther George, who just before Jackson Hole said in an interview with CNBC that it was time for the Fed to begin thinking about raising interest rates “when you see the economy getting as close as we are to full employment.”
But Sebastian and his group told George that the economy was nowhere near full employment and that the analysis of the inflation hawks was “lacking in relevance, substance and rigor.” One member of the group told of how she went from being an MBA who had risen to a management job over 15 years to being laid off and unable to find work for months, finally settling for a job that paid half as much as the job she lost.
It’s not clear what substantive effect hearing these stories had on George and other inflation hawks on the Fed, Sebastian said. “But I do hope we contributed to her thinking and we also started an engagement” with the Fed, he said. Fed members now know that when they discuss economic policy, “you can’t make decisions without public scrutiny anymore, because we’re paying attention now.”
One of the ideas that the group will refine and attempt to build consensus around would have the Fed invest directly in infrastructure bonds and similar government instruments, in much the same way that it purchased billions in bonds to prop up the financial sector in the years following the 2008 financial crash. The bond-purchasing program, known as quantitative easing, helped boost Wall Street share prices, according to most experts, but had no direct effect on job-creation or on bringing the economic recovery to communities around the country hardest hit by the crash – as the nation has now vividly seen in Ferguson, Mo.
Having the Fed directly buy bonds that would enable federal, state or local governments to fund transportation projects, school construction or other public facilities would put the Fed’s power to work in ways that directly creates jobs in the short run and assets that enhance the nation’s competitiveness and well-being in the long run.
The Fed could also better use its regulatory authority to prod the banks to pour into the economy the close to $2 trillion that is now sitting in its vaults. That hoarded cash could be put to work creating jobs and lifting the wages of working-class people.
Whatever policies take shape during the next phase of the Center for Popular Democracy’s campaign to keep the Fed focused on full employment, Sebastian says that the opening round has been a success in sending the message that “we’re not in an inflation crisis … we are in an unemployment crisis. You can’t ignore an ongoing crisis for the sake of a ghost of inflation that may or may not appear.”
Quit Your Job and Go to Work
This spring, Michanne was striding out of a San Francisco apartment lobby in her Google Express jacket, fresh off...
This spring, Michanne was striding out of a San Francisco apartment lobby in her Google Express jacket, fresh off delivering a mirror. Her van beckoned at the curb. It was branded in Google’s playful primary colors and logo, and on the side was the image of a package getting dropped from a parachute, easy-peasy. Michanne’s job was to make same-day, seamless deliveries of bottled water and kitty litter for Google Express, but she doesn’t actually work for Google Express — not directly, anyway. If you looked carefully, just below the van door, a few small, gray letters spelled out something most people didn’t realize: this vehicle wasn’t Google’s after all. It belonged to a company called 1–800Courier.
That day had actually been a good one. Michanne, who is 27, had worked the full eight hour shift that she’d been scheduled by 1–800Courier — one of several companies that delivers for Google Express in the Bay Area, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and New York City. But full days like that were becoming rare. (She didn’t want to use her last name for privacy reasons.)
When I called her back a month later and asked her to rate her job from 1 to 10, she was more upfront about her level of annoyance: “If 1 is a nightmare, I’m like a 1.5.” In fact, she’d quit.
Her complaint came down to this: she says 1–800Courier had verbally assured her full-time work when she started with the company back in October. It was a paycheck the new mother was counting on, one that didn’t leave her time to work another job. And in the company’s scheduling app she was technically scheduled for 40 hours a week for weeks in advance.
Yet, increasingly, her actual hours were decided the day of work. Michanne had to check her email an hour and a half before her first shift started to see if she would actually get to work the hours she’d been allotted. Many times she did not. She was a supposedly full-time employee who was, effectively, on-call. She’d put aside the day so she could work, but when it turned out they didn’t need her, that meant no work — and no pay.
In April, an email plunked into Michanne’s inbox, describing what she says was business as usual:
Even when she got the go-ahead to turn up for the day, Michanne’s shifts would often be cut once she was already at work. Around 5 p.m., as she ate in her van during an hour-long meal break, she would frequently get a call from the dispatcher, telling her to go home early without working her scheduled second shift. She’d still get paid something— California law mandates payment of between two hour and four hours of “reporting time” depending on the length of a cancelled shift. But it was still a huge issue: Although she was expected to be on-call for 40 hours a week, shift changes meant she was regularly dipping down to 25 hours of paid work, and even once as low as 17 hours, she recalls. At $13 an hour, she was hoping for $520 of work each week — but 17 hours is just $221.
Google pointed questions towards its contractor, which manages all scheduling for its deliveries. 1–800Courier’s California Director of Operations David Finney said that across the industry, the delivery business slows down after the holidays. “I personally empathize with that,” he said about employees whose hours get cut. “But at the same time, look at any industry in the state of California — especially in the service industry — and some days it’s just like ‘Hey, we’re sorry, we don’t need you to come in.’”
Another employee of 1–800Courier, who asked to remain anonymous so as to not irk the company, says the scheduling problems were sometimes bad for the company, too. Back in January and February, when business seemed especially slow, this worker would clock in and sit in the delivery car near the hub for hours, waiting to be dispatched. “I’d have movies picked out to watch, I got a pillow and took naps, and had stuff I wanted to read and write. I’m getting paid to do nothing. But I wouldn’t call
[dispatch] and say, ‘I need a route.’ It didn’t bother me at all.”
What did bother the Netflix-watching worker was this: more than 10 times during seven months on the job, their first shift was cut while it was already happening. But the worker was booked on to a second shift, and was made to wait around until that started. Since driving the vehicle back to the parking lot in Silicon Valley from the San Francisco dispatch hub would eat up most of the time, the worker would often drive to the movies or the mall in the city to kill time until the second shift. (The worker once got written up for taking the vehicle to Safeway during that time — saying they expected employees to just wait in the vehicle for the next shift, or drive it back to the Silicon Valley lot.)
The complaint is echoed by another former 1–800Courier worker who recently quit: “I was really getting irritated. They said ‘it’s not as high demand right now, we don’t have a lot of orders coming through, so we’re cutting the hours.’” A couple times, while the worker was in a carpool on the way to work, the dispatcher would call and say, “Oh, we removed you from the 12–5 window, you can just work for 5:30 to 10. I’d just go home and say ‘Remove me from the last window.’” The current driver says things have picked up lately, especially after a major lay-off of drivers in March that has given those who remain more work to do. 1-800's David Finney wouldn’t confirm a layoff, but said drivers are now regularly working overtime hours.
The whole idea behind the on-demand economy — touch-of-a-button delivery, often guaranteed within minutes — creates the potential for a sudden rush or dearth of customers at any moment. So how does a company make sure that the right amount of workers are around at the moment it needs them to be?
You’d think that this is something that Google, the emperor of analytics, might be able to figure out. But the company it had chosen to organize the deliveries, 1–800Courier, had not. Sometimes workers lucked out and watched movies in their cars, but more often they suffered for their employer’s failure. There may have been an abundance of employees scheduled for shifts, but ultimately the people were just as on-demand as the Costco kitty litter they delivered.
Outside of Silicon Valley, American labor is looking a lot like this already. The old, sanctified status of “employee” is getting egged in the face. The days of blue-collar job, suburban tract home, Disney vacay, and pension awaiting at the end of the 9–5 rainbow looks like a curious blip on the way to a more profit-maximized, capitalist future. It’s the age of the precariat: unions are nearly kaput, many will only know pensions from history books, and most “at will” workers can be fired as easily as Uber can kick its drivers off the app. Now many old titans of industry have latched onto this idea of on-call shift work — which many call “just-in-time scheduling,” — a grayish labor abuse tailored for the age of the text message that has lawmakers hustling to curb it.
Since the recession, millions of workers have taken part-time gigs when they’d prefer to have full-time ones — especially in hospitality and retail. And those part-time jobs increasingly jerk the workers around: In a University of Chicago study of young workers in hourly jobs, 41 percent said they got their shifts a week or less in advance. It gets worse from there: as a recent story in Harper’s Magazine laid out, companies use software to track customer flow down to the minute; resulting in managers who ask workers to be on call for work shifts, or clock out while on the job and hang around without pay during slow times to see if the workflow will pick up. Sarah Leberstein is a senior staff attorney from the National Employment Law Project, which has been monitoring the hellish scheduling practices. “The companies want to unload all the flexibility onto the workers, but workers can’t afford to live in such a state of flux.”
This spring, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sent letters to 13 national retailers including Urban Outfitters to Target to Gap to Sears, questioning them about using software tracking systems and whether they made employees get the go-ahead for work less than a day before a shift:
Re: Request for Information Regarding “on call shifts”
Our office has received reports that a growing number of employers, particularly in the retail industry, require their hourly workers to work what are sometimes known as “on call shifts” — that is, requiring their employees to call in to work just a few hours in advance, or the night before, to determine whether the worker needs to appear for work that day or the next. If the employee is told that his or her services are not needed, the employee will receive no pay for that day, despite being required to be available to appear on the job site the next day or even just a few hours later on the same day. For many workers, that is too little time to make arrangements for family needs, let alone to find an alternative source of income to compensate for the lost pay.
If “just-in-time scheduling” sounds a whole lot like on-demand work, that’s because it is.
It’s not just in America that this practice is increasing. In Europe, it’s called the “zero hour” job — you’re promised work, but guaranteed nothing. And these contracts have been causing controversy in Britain ever since the financial crisis, which saw a dramatic rise in the number of just-in-time jobs as employers offloaded their risks onto the workforce. Today, almost 2 million jobs in the U.K. are now on-call. In some cases, workers are denied the benefits of full-time employees, or are prevented from finding other paying gigs without the permission of their employer — even if that employer cancels all of their shifts.
And it’s not just service industry jobs: zero hours have spread into other areas of the British economy, too. Recent figures suggest 13 percent of all healthcare workers and 10 percent of all education jobs are now in the same kind of hole that Michanne found herself in. (Finney from 1–800 said he does not consider the company’s scheduling to fall into the “just-in-time” trend.)
“The writing on the wall is we’re going to see more of an Uber and Lyft approach to workforce management in more industries,” says Carrie Gleason from the Center for Popular Democracy, a Brooklyn-based labor and social justice nonprofit. “You can see that in the just-in-time scheduling — you only want to pay for people when they’re doing the most productive work. The cost of doing business is put on the worker, so any time they’re not producing a car fare or a retail sale, it’s the worker paying for that time, not the company.”
On-demand companies pitch themselves as ultimate disrupters, breaking free of stuffy, old-world straitjackets of work. For many companies in this exploding area, there are no zero hour jobs — because the jobs have no set hours at all. The workers are independent contractors, not employees, and, at many companies, can log into work when they choose. In fact, Silicon Valley’s Chief Optimism Officer, Marc Andreessen — the venture capitalist who is funding Lyft and Instacart to build our app-based freelancer future —recently waved away a reporter’s comment about the precarious app workers in the New Yorker:“Maybe there’s an alternate way of living,” he said. “A free-form life where you press the button and get work when you want to.”
It also saves companies payroll taxes, wages, benefits — and the headache of scheduling workers. (“What other job out there can you just turn it on when you want to start and off when you want to stop — whenever you feel like it?” asked Uber CEO Travis Kalanick in his five-year company anniversaryspeech last week.)
“Uber doesn’t care if 100 or 200 are reporting to work because Uber will get the same percentage of the fare” says Leberstein, the National Employment Law Project attorney. “They’re shifting the burden of deciding whether there’s enough work onto the workers.” Many companies go so far as to give drivers a weekly breakdown on the most high-earning hours — in fact, there are entire apps dedicated to helping workers track that for themselves.
Companies claim these freedom-loving toilers will flee the moment they’re pinned down by shifts or bureaucracy. Their own internal studies suggest this is true: one Uber-commissioned poll of drivers showed more than 70 percent preferred to be their own boss rather than work a 9-to-5. About 50 percent of Lyft’s drivers drive five hours a week or less. A survey by the Freelancer’s Union found 42 percent went freelance to have more flexibility in their schedule.
“If everybody has to work a certain amount of hours, then it would put the model at risk because then it would be a very rigid model,” says Pascal Levy-Garboua, the head of business at Checkr, and organizer of a conference about the on-demand economy held in San Francisco last month. He has driven for Lyft in the past anywhere from 10 to 20 hours a week to see how it works for himself — then goes months without driving at all. “That would be the opposite of on-demand. Demand and supply are elastic, and the model works because there’s an equilibrium. If supply” — the industry’s term for what the rest of the world usually calls “workers” — “is not elastic, the model breaks.”
Yet a survey of more than 1,000 workers released last month by Requests for Startups, a tech-booster newsletter, popped a hole in what had been the great selling point of contract work in the new economy:
Work hours are demand-dependent despite the touted schedule flexibility. Although schedule flexibility is the #1 stated reason for joining a company as a contractor, ‘Peak hours / demand’ ranked highest amongst influencers of their work schedules, with nearly 50% selecting it as a very important influencer (‘My Family’ was the 2nd highest at 35%). This influence is particularly glaring when comparing current vs. ideal hours of ridesharing respondents, whose responses suggest that their ideal working hours aren’t too far off from the traditional 9–5.
Among the top reasons for leaving the job were insufficient pay (43 percent) and — spoiler alert for industry cheerleaders — insufficient flexibility (26 percent). In short, while the apps may be good for people who have another job and merely want to pad their income, if workers want to make a living on these apps, they actually have little flexibility — they need to work full-time or more, and they better be signed into work during the peak times.
The on-demand workplace is not one-size-fits-all: while complete flexibility works well for driving services with a 24-hour demand and a ready stable of drivers, companies dependent on burritos and Thai take-out reaching hungry customers have to be a bit more organized about who is on hand at meal times.
To get around this problem, many companies have started doing to their independent contractors exactly what 1-800Courier does to its employees: schedule them onto shifts.
At Postmates, an on-demand food delivery company, contractors sign up the week before for shifts in down-to-the-hour increments — those who confirm their availability are offered potential jobs first, meaning they can end up making substantially more than those hopping on the app to work spontaneously. As further motivation, Postmates also guarantees couriers who sign up for shifts a minimum of $15 an hour on weekends — if their jobs don’t add up to that, Postmates will pay them directly.
Scheduling contractors is a legally gray thing to do — since shifts are one of the IRS’ criteria in determining that a worker is an employee. (Indeed, Postmates, like many companies, is currently facing a lawsuit over classifying the couriers as contractors.)
Postmates says they aren’t shifts, exactly: workers aren’t bound to the hours they pre-select — they could just not sign into the app during the shift. Yet there are consequences. If they miss five of their allotted hours in a week, they’ll be suspended from work for 48 hours, as this email forwarded by one courier warns:
In order to avoid banishment, Postmates contractors ask for swaps on the app, much like employees have to do when they can’t make a shift.
And, like ridesharing companies, Postmates has another mechanism to get unscheduled contractors out on the road during peak times: its own surge-pricing model called “blitzes.” While the courier’s take of the delivery fee always stays the same —80 percent — blitzes increase that fee two or even three times the usual amount.
Postmates also polices the workers once signed in: one courier in New York City who asked not to be named (he didn’t want to get kicked off the app) showed me texts from the company: sometimes Postmates asks him why he’s not accepting more jobs, sometimes it commands him to stop only accepting jobs that he determines will be worth his time, and sometimes it suspends him temporarily from the app entirely. A Postmates spokeswoman says the real-time texts are aimed at getting feedback on why certain jobs aren’t attractive to couriers.
The take-away: as traditional jobs are looking more on-demand, on-demand contractor ones aren’t looking as flexible as they claim.
So where does that leave us? Employment and contractor labor models already seem to be converging at some sort of semi-flexible purgatory.
In the eyes of those who cry that companies like Uber or Lyft or Postmates are getting rich off exploiting a labor loophole — blithely skipping out of paying wages, benefits, and expenses like gas because they classify workers as freelancers—companies like 1–800Courier are actually playing the good guy. (Or at least the less evil guy.) The company has official employees which it pays $12.50 to $13 an hour, plus worker’s comp, overtime, and expenses, including gas and the occasional parking ticket.
“I do want to go on the record to say we try really hard to do right by our employees,” Finney from 1–800Courier says. “We’re not going to pass that cost onto someone else so we can save a buck… We’re practically one of the only companies in the state of California that uses the employee model. It’s the right thing to do, and, in the long run, it will be the best solution because we’ll be able to provide the best service because we have employees. With independent contractors, there’s a lot of control you give up because you can’t tell independent contractors what to do.”
Still, 1–800Courier's own problems show that employers in the on-demand economy have to be adept at managing their workflow. Otherwise they’ll lose money on wasted labor when there’s low demand, or be caught short when there’s a sudden surge.
This is not impossible. Already some on-demand companies claim to have figured it out.
One vocal proponent of employees in the industry is Managed by Q’s CEO Dan Teran, who has written about the decision to employ its workers to clean and manage offices in New York City. Their workers get to choose their work days and receive a steady schedule, and the company books them at worksites that are on convenient subway routes from their home or other job sites. Still, the company gets off easy since most of the workflow is pre-determined and consistent week to week.
The San Francisco food service Munchery has been also held up as one of the good guys in the new push-button delivery business — one of a short list that employs its couriers. One San Francisco bike messenger named Jennifer told me Munchery pays $18-an-hour plus tips from a collective tip pool — much higher than minimum wage. Still, Munchery experienced its own trip-ups. Jennifer told me that after she started working for them at the beginning of the year, there were too many messengers working the four-and-a-half hour dinner delivery window. “They were just sitting around waiting. I was told that it had been really slow for many months,” she says.
Around the end of January, Jennifer says Munchery laid off 11 bike messengers. (CEO Tri Tran would not give details of the company’s staffing, but says the layoffs were not a huge correction considering the size of his payroll: “Ten people we need to shift around — that’s a very small number for the workforce we have.”) Munchery also gets out ahead of its demand by putting parameters on how instantaneously “on-demand” it can be: outside of San Francisco’s city limits, you have to have ordered dinner by 2:00 in the afternoon, and choose an hour-long delivery window.
The workflow problems seem to be resolved for now. Since the layoffs, Jennifer says she’s delivered a steady flow of meals with little loafing.
Still, Munchery has a strong advantage: people generally eat dinner at a predictable time. Consistency is a harder promise in truly in-the-moment businesses, like Uber and Lyft, Postmates, or Google Express. How can employees ever be scheduled with perfect accuracy in those businesses? Does an hourly employee have to work rigid shifts?
Shannon Liss-Riordan is a Boston-based labor attorney suing many on-demand companies over their attempts to classify workers as contractors. She says flexible shifts aren’t incompatible with employee status: “That’s total BS. Employees can have flexible work schedules, employers are doing that all the time. All of these arguments being made are real red herrings that they’re trying to throw out there. It’s part of the whole ‘Oh, the workers love this, because they love the flexibility.’ You can give them flexibility, andpay their worker’s comp. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.” She cites one precedent-setting California case about cucumber growers who were found in California Supreme Court to be employees, even though they could set their own hours.
Of course, salaried, white-collar workers — who can call their own shots and rarely earn overtime — often have a great deal in flexibility at work. That’s harder for employees getting paid by the hour. Could part-time employees log in and out of work willy nilly, paid by the hours they actually work? Highly unlikely. If companies have to pony up for the workers, there’s little benefit to them for allowing workers to come and go as they please. Shelby Clark, executive director of Peers, which helps on-demand workers find and manage their workload, has done some back-of-the-envelope calculations on the base cost of having employees. Companies only start recovering their employee costs if workers are putting in a baseline of hours, but not overtime, “so you’d probably have a floor and a cap [on hours], and then not more than eight hours a day. You’d start to see a lot of constraints that defeat why people work in the sharing economy.”
That’s exactly what the disgruntled New York City Postmates courier told me. Despite getting pestered by texts to accept more jobs and bad tips, he explained why he stayed: “The only thing I like about this job is the freedom and flexibility.” Take away that, and he’d do what companies fear the most, especially as the competition for these workers grows: he’d never sign in for work again.
Which was exactly what Michanne at 1-800Courier did, after being forced to be flexible when she wanted stable work. In late April, she quit. Ironically, even though she was an employee, her reasons for leaving were the same as all those on-demand workers who were surveyed: lack of flexibility and low pay. She now works at a car dealership, 9-to-6.
It appears 1–800, on the other hand, is only ramping up. In the last month, the company has blanketed Craigslist with job ads for Google Express drivers to deliver for a “new upscale concierge service,” “a really cool company” to deliver retail items to homes and businesses around Silicon Valley. “It makes me wonder why they fired all those people, if they’re just going turn around and hire more,” the current employee told me while sitting in her van waiting
for a second shift to begin last week. “Just so you can fire everyone again?”
Among the listed perks in the ad? “Stable schedules” and “multiple shift choices.”
Source: Mic
Simplify Investments to Keep Them Clean
New York Times - May 11, 2014, Room for Debate: Connie Razza - Public pensions are under threat from outright fraud as...
New York Times - May 11, 2014, Room for Debate: Connie Razza - Public pensions are under threat from outright fraud as well as the financial sector’s drive to generate higher profits for itself, regardless of the cost to our communities. The public can take simple steps to eliminate this danger. Investments should be put in index funds, which typically outperform actively managed portfolios. A recent comprehensive study of the performance of state pension funds found that the 46 state funds studied could save $6 billion in fees annually, while achieving returns as good or better than their actively managed portfolios. Most privately managed pensions already pursue indexing strategies, through vehicles like Amalgamated Bank’s LongView Funds, and successfully secure strong retirement savings for participants. Public pension funds should index a significant portion of their funds under management to save billions while still generating first-rate returns.
Index funds outperform managed portfolios. Relying on them would save on fees and avoid underhanded behavior.
These funds would also save significant amounts in management fees by hiring talented in-house investment managers for significant portions of actively managed pension assets.
Any investment should be presented in plain language in a standardized, easy-to-read template, so trustees and pension participants know exactly what the product does, how it makes money and what its fees and risks are. Like cell phone agreements, all fees should be disclosed up front. Like credit card bills, actual returns and long-term, historical performance should be clearly presented. Oversight of fiduciaries should be bolstered and any who violate their responsibility to retirement funds should be pursued legally. When the State Employees Association of North Carolina hired a pension forensic investigator, they found that the state treasurer Janet Cowell had invested $30 billion in illegal, high-risk funds, causing $6.8 billion in losses. A more robust standing oversight body could have prevented much of that improper investment. The state should aggressively prosecute both pension trustees and private investment managers who put their own benefit above the interest of pension participants. More eyes on the management of retirement assets would help ensure responsible investment strategies and management. Creating a publicly managed pool of retirement funds would invest more residents in pension management, while ensuring that fewer workers would find themselves insecure in retirement. And, increased pension funds make possible more diverse, responsible investments for the actively managed portions of the funds. For instance, funds can take a decisive role in infrastructure investments that will both improve their communities and provide steady, long-term returns.
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Black Unemployment Rate 2015: In Better Economy, African-Americans See Minimal Gains
International Business Times - March 8, 2014, by Aaron Morrison - Cyril Darensbourg has been unemployed for 10 years....
International Business Times - March 8, 2014, by Aaron Morrison - Cyril Darensbourg has been unemployed for 10 years. As shocking as he knows that sounds to those who don’t know him personally, the 48-year-old native of New Orleans had enjoyed a 15-year career managing restaurants in Chicago and New York, after taking a chance on a dream and ending his third year of studying electrical engineering in Louisiana. Years of job-application submissions and temporary work here and there has persisted for far too long. Darensbourg is one of close to 2 million African-Americans in the U.S. who are currently unemployed and looking for work.
Across the American economy, the dominant story during the past several months has been a sustained recovery that resuscitated a dormant job market and the accompanying unemployment rate that has plunged below pre-Great Recession levels. But if better days are here for many workers, this feeling is shared to a lesser degree by African-Americans, whose unemployment rate is still considered high and has long been double the rate for whites. Among black working-age people, however, the unemployment rate since February 2014 has dropped more quickly than among nonblack workers.
On the surface, that improvement should signal a triumph, but it is accompanied by an asterisk, given the fact that nonblack workers’ unemployment rates fell much earlier and faster during the recovery. Government data indicates recent job creation has been less beneficial to African-American workers when compared with whites, Asians and Hispanics: Basically, blacks had more ground to make up and their labor-force representation is skewed toward lower-wage industries in which there are higher turnover rates, one study found.
These clear-cut differences mean that for people such as Darensbourg, who have been out of work for periods of several months or several years, other factors exaggerate the length of their unemployment. Many African-Americans find it hard to dismiss completely the role that race plays in their difficulty finding work, even with federal laws making discrimination illegal. Studies have found that even when black applicants possess qualifications that are on par with white applicants, variables as simple as their names or as complex as the breadth of their professional networks can many times hold them back.
“I’ve never felt secure, in my entire adult life working,” said Darensbourg, who is now married with two kids and living with his family in a New York apartment. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 eliminated his management-level job at a restaurant located within the no-traffic zone, he was forced to look for work in other restaurants, which he said wouldn’t pay him at his previous annual salary of nearly six figures.
“I’ve been in disbelief,” said Darensbourg, a 6-foot-5-inch, 220-pound man who is often told his presence is at worst intimidating and at best unforgettable. During an interview for a job he was certain he would get, he recalled feeling his younger, white, female interviewer was put off by his size and confidence. “Over time, I didn’t know what to do,” he said of the experience.
“People in my situation are giving up. They are just adapting their lives to where they are. I’m not thinking about trying to buy a home or going on vacation. I don’t know how retirement is going to work,” Darensbourg said.
Unemployment Among Blacks Still High
In February, the unemployment rate for African-Americans was 10.4 percent, while the comparable rates for whites, Hispanics and Asians were 4.7 percent, 6.6 percent and 4.0 percent, in that order, according to data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Friday. The national unemployment rate was 5.5 percent last month. Last year, 23.7 percent of those who are black and unemployed had attended some college, 15.4 percent had bachelor’s degrees and 4.5 percent had advanced degrees.
A 2014 study by the Young Invincibles, a nonpartisan education and economic opportunity advocacy group, found an African-American college graduate has the same job prospects as a white high-school dropout or a white person with a prison record. The study attributed the gap to racial discrimination.
The experience of joblessness for African-Americans can have a lasting effect on their economic mobility, according to the Center for Popular Democracy, a liberal think tank in New York that released a report on black unemployment this week. It was prepared with the technical assistance of the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute in Washington. On an hourly basis during the past 15 years, black workers’ wages have fallen by 44 cents, while Hispanic and white workers’ wages have risen by 48 cents and 45 cents, respectively, according to the report. Black wealth has also shrunk, while Hispanic and white wealth has stabilized.
Since March 2010, black employment climbed by about 2.3 million jobs, a 15.0 percent increase, and the black employment-population ratio rose to 54.8 percent from 52.0 percent, according to government data. Over the same period, white employment climbed by about 3.8 million jobs, a 3.4 percent increase, and the employment-population ratio rose to 60.1 percent from 59.5 percent. Because whites had less ground to make up, the increase for blacks, while statistically significant, still wasn’t large enough to suggest that they reaped more than a modest share of the gains in the economic recovery.
Most jobs that came back during the recovery, close to 45 percent, were lower-wage jobs, such as those in the retail and service industries, according to the Center for Popular Democracy’s report. Those industries employ 1.85 million more workers today than they did at the beginning of the recession. The data indicate African-American representation is skewed toward the lower-wage end, rather than toward either the mid-wage range or higher-wage end, where fewer jobs came back.
The center said the U.S. Federal Reserve’s recovery initiative to stimulate job creation through its monetary policies has been most beneficial to workers in higher-wage industries and to workers in regions of the U.S. where those jobs exist, such as on Wall Street. Even with the apparently gloomy outlook, economists say things are improving for black job seekers. “The economic recovery is finally beginning to take hold,” said Valerie Wilson, the director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy. “The rate of growth that we’re seeing now, this has only been happening for a year.”
Economists have stressed the Fed’s focus should be on genuine full employment. That’s been President Barack Obama’s argument for addressing joblessness among all Americans. But critics have said this approach ignores structural reasons -- lower educational attainment and higher rates of criminal convictions -- for African-American joblessness that is more prone to fluctuation than whites. “Assuming that monetary policy continues to function in a way that allows the recovery to proceed, the prospects for finding a job should improve for African-Americans,” Wilson said.
Education Can Make A Difference (Usually)
African-Americans who have achieved higher-education degrees -- a key investment leading to the middle class -- still find themselves more likely to face long-term unemployment than their white, Hispanic and Asian counterparts. According to the Center for Popular Democracy’s study, the only proven solution to this problem are those Fed programs that ideally stimulate job creation for workers of all experience and skill levels. But that still has not been robust enough to help the broadest swath of African-American workers.
Tamica Thompson said she could use preferential hiring consideration, although she didn’t believe she needed it before her long-term unemployment set in. Thompson’s difficulty in finding a job puzzles her. A 30-year-old born to Jamaican immigrants in New York, Thompson joined the U.S. Army in 2002, right after she graduated from high school. She was stationed in South Korea, and left active duty four years later to earn a bachelor’s degree in health-service management from Berkeley College in New York. She later obtained a master’s degree in public administration from Pace University in New York.
But even with those credentials and her military experience, Thompson has struggled to find a job that values her skill set. When she did interview for a promising job at a nonprofit development corporation -- for which the hiring manager told her she was the sole applicant -- she later discovered the position was given to someone else. She also worried that the formatting of her paper resume, which received a harsh critique from a job-placement counselor, was a factor in the length of her unemployment.
“I was unemployed for a good eight months until I found myself here,” Thompson said, referring to a stipend-supported internship for Operation: GoodJobs, a work-placement program run by the Goodwill Industries for Greater New York and Northern New Jersey, an initiative that helps military veterans and their families find jobs and training opportunities. The irony of her current situation is not lost on Thompson, who works to help other veterans find jobs while she scrapes by on the stipend. “Because I was not working, I was getting behind on my rent. I couldn’t do even the simple things anymore. Money was so limited for me. That caused me to be depressed, sad and angry. It’s a little better now, but I’m still struggling,” she said.
Race And Class Are Factors In Unemployment
Despite federal laws protecting women and racial minorities from discrimination by employers, several studies point to racial prejudices and favoritism as big contributors to how blacks fare in the job market. A 2004 study by the American Economic Review found job seekers with resumes that had so-called white-sounding names received 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. Names such as Jamal or Lakisha or others that are perceived as black-sounding names, received fewer callbacks. That racial gap is uniform across occupation, industry and employer size, researchers found.
Another study, conducted by the business school at Rutgers University in New Jersey, found that favoritism, or the race of the hiring manager, was a contributing factor to racial disparity in the workplace as well. The prevalence of a mind-set in the U.S. that the rich worked hard for everything they have and poor haven’t toiled enough certainly doesn’t help matters, said Sam Brooke, an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit organization based in Montgomery, Alabama, that tracks racial disparity and hatred. “There’s a deep, fierce resistance to setting aside that idea,” Brooke said. “That’s an incredibly valuable part of the story that we tell about America. If you view it just through that lens, it’s hard to see how we’ll overcome” the disparities, he said.
The Civil Rights Act of 1991 made changes to a law passed in the 1960s that protected workers from intentional employment discrimination based on race, sex, religion and national origin. It also provided monetary damages in cases of proved discrimination. But few cases are won in U.S. courts, and a comparatively small proportion are resolved by settlements, according to federal data.
Darensbourg, the unemployed former restaurant manager, hasn’t considered a lawsuit against a prospective employer, even when he suspected that there was something more to its rejection of him than his qualifications. “I’m pushing my kids to do way better than I did in school,” he said. “I can’t pay for them to go to school. I don’t know how that would happen unless they got a scholarship. I tell my daughter that she is not just competing with the kids at her school; she’s competing with the whole world. I try to have them see stuff that my parents didn’t show me.”
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